Thursday 1 Ottmar Hitzfeld turns down the job of German national coach. Bradford survive: their administrators are in talks with “interested parties”. MK Dons, meanwhile, prepare for their headlong dive through, uh, League One by coming out of administration. James Milner is set to join Newcastle while his ex-team-mate Mark Viduka completes a medical at Boro (peevishness may not show up in the tests).
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Stories
A fantasy football site which rewards ineptitude leads off Ian Plenderleith's guide to low quality web-browsing. And ideas don't get much worse than on a site offering pet coats for sale in club colours
There are few football fans who haven’t attempted to manage fantasy teams at some point over the past ten years, because we all harbour an illusion that we could do a better job than the men who are paid millions just to mostly mess up. Then we discover that the players we picked did not perform to expectations. This has not led to a noticeable rise in understanding of the trials and setbacks suffered by those in charge of a real team, but at least most of us now realise, after finishing in position 124,971 of whichever league we entered, that we are just as clueless as the men we routinely scorn and heckle from the safety of the stands.
In the first of a series of articles looking at how the tournament was received at home, Al Needham strokes his chin, sifts through the discarded plastic flagpoles and wonders where all those crosses of St George came from. And does it mean anything anyway?
It’s good for a country and its people to take stock and re-evaluate its sense of identity every now and then, and I did just that in a bus shelter last month, sitting next to an elderly Jamaican woman, watching the endless procession of cars with plastic white flags with red crosses clipped to their windows. Where had they come from? It wasn’t this bad in 2002. Had a giant sandcastle firm been made bankrupt, or something? Was it just a local thing? And what did it all mean? “Look at these fools,” said the Jamaican woman, all of a sudden. “They don’t know what it means to be patriotic. In Jamaica, we have the flag up all year round, not for some… pussyclaat football game.” Then she sucked her teeth. For a very long time.
Portugal resident Phil Town watched the local reaction to the national team's efforts change from despair to delight and back again over the course of Euro 2004
Well, it was, according to UEFA chief Lennart Johansson, the best-organised European championship ever. It did not have any cases of doping, and terrorism of any kind was thankfully conspicuous by its absence. It was also, of recent editions, the least scarred by hooliganism. Banning orders slapped on around 3,000 of England’s “finest”, plus a similar number from Germany, will have helped that, but so will a general sense, on the ground, that having a good time might just be better fun than kicking heads. And the mild-mannered and relatively non-aggressive nature of the Portuguese gave this mood a valuable helping hand.
The World Cup has had to expand to the point where it can be too much of a good thing, believes Philip Cornwall, who thinks the European Championship is now perfection
It’s part of the calendar of the football fan’s life. One summer is dominated by the World Cup; then there’s a quiet year; but now the European Championship circus rolls in, in many ways a less cumbersome, more accessible (closer if you want to go; always in our time zone if you don’t) and so more perfect tournament than the global event. Euro 2004 offers a steady stream of daily matches stretching for a fortnight, then a less intense but more important final week, finishing on a Fourth of July that will be celebrated so wildly in one country that visiting Americans will complain about the fireworks. The tournament’s rise, creating a two-rather than four-year cycle, has ensured the eclipse of the international friendly, making them training grounds for the games that truly decide coach’s jobs.