Search: ' World Cup 2006'

The US saw their maserplan for World Cup domination fall into place. Rich Zahradnik offers an insight on their tournament

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! The sound inside my head when the alarm clock goes off at 1.20am for Argentina v Nigeria. One -twenty in the morning. I am not meant to be awake now. I am old. My living room is dark, quiet, empty. I don’t even bother to turn the light on. Daytime from the TV is strange at this hour, filling the room with Asian sunshine. I can’t have a cup of coffee because I need to go back to bed in a couple of hours for another couple of hours, so that I can wake up and watch England v Sweden then drive for an hour and a half to play for my Sunday league side and then talk intelligently with my team-mates about these games I’m probably not even going to remember.

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Dear WSC
You may not be aware that fans from Madrid and Leverkusen attending the Champions League final at Hampden Park were handed a Scottish goody bag by the Daily Record containing, among other things, a Tunnock’s caramel wafer and a can of Coke. Class.
Glenn McCall, Dundee

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There's a World Cup coming up, apparently, so we invited three well-travelled journalists to make some rash predictions about what will happen. As a Swede based in London Marcus Christenson has ties to two of the countries in Group F. Gabriele Marcotti has lived in Japan and how tries to explain English football to Italians and vice-versa. Alan Duncan reports regularly on Nigeria and Cameroon, who face England and Ireland respectively, as well as the three other African qualifiers

Are playing styles and tactics are becoming more homogeneous throughout the world, because most of the top players are playing in the same leagues? If so, does that make the World Cup less interesting?
Gabriele Marcotti There’s a greater uniformity. Not just in the way teams play, but also in how they train. If you look at the size of the Italian or Spanish players, they are now as big as the northern Europeans are expected to be. Everybody’s an athlete. Some of the English play­ers still get drunk and irresponsible but the impression I get with players like Beckham and Owen is that they train seriously and take care of their diet. In some ways it has become more uniform, but in a positive way – the level of fitness has definitely increased everywhere.

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Mathias Kowoll leads us round the grounds that the home nations may or may not be visiting four summers from now

Does anyone remember Sir Bert Millichip’s al­leged promise to the DFB (German FA) that Eng­land would not bid for the 2006 World Cup because Germany had supported Eng­land for Euro 96? Well, Bert himself didn’t. But Franz Böhmert, the president of Wer­der Bremen, must have recalled it when he found out that the Weserstadion would not be one of the 12 stadiums sel­ected for 2006.

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With Sepp Blatter on the ropes, Alan Tomlinson looks at how FIFA might reform itself

FIFA’s motto is: “For the good of the game.” The slo­gan is often parroted by the insiders in the FIFA elite, as they gloat from their luxury rooms in the world’s top hotels, or welcome you to their bunker-like FIFA House in the exclusive hillside suburb overlooking Lake Zurich, the Alpine summits across the water and the self-satisfied gloss of Zurich’s Banhofstrasse, with its top designer stores and morally dodgy banks. The FIFA elite is comfortable here. The wives of FIFA’s top brass like the lobbies and the stores. The FIFA men themselves like the loot and the secrecy.

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