It’s not the winning but the losing that counts

Originally published on 90minutesonline on 21/04/09

As football seasons across Europe come to a close, everyone is supposedly neglecting the rear parts of their seats and experiencing bouts of incontinence.

But why? Most seasons ended a long time ago, when certain teams decided to lose the odd game or two.

The Portuguese league was decided in favour of Porto when Benfica lost at home to Guimarães in March and Sporting lost at home to Braga in February.

The Premiership is supposedly wide open, but you know Manchester United are going to win it. This was decided when Middlesbrough popped a cap in Liverpool’s ass in February and Chelsea were guffed on by Tottenham in March.

Even if you disagree with that, you can’t take umbrage with the suggestion that losing is inherently more exciting than winning.

How excited were you when Manchester United lost two games in a row, to Liverpool and Fulham? Probably more than you were when they beat Sunderland 2-1.

And how excited were you when Everton beat them this weekend? More than you would have been had they won.

Many may argue that one of the news stories of the weekend was Wolves winning and getting promoted to the Premiership, but the real story was Charlton losing and booking a place in League One next season.

You already know what will happen with Wolves: they’ll be relegated next year.

But Charlton’s fate, like that of Leeds and Manchester City when they dropped into the third tier, is anyone’s guess. Consequentl,y their future is about 638 times more interesting than Wolves’.

Losing is where it’s at, and as the European leagues draw to a close, it only takes a cursory glance at the tables to see that the bottoms are much more congested and unpredictable than the tops, with the possible exception of the German league.

The only thing in the Premiership making me leak streams of piss on to my underwear and down my legs is Newcastle’s attempts to lose enough games to ensure relegation. If they go down, a lot of people will find themselves in much more of a frenzy than if they’d won a few more games and finished mid-table.

Liga Sagres

All of this is why this week’s Liga Sagres was, despite what the scorelines might suggest, more boring than a night in with Glenn Roeder.

Porto didn’t lose, Benfica didn’t lose, and despite nearly losing, Sporting scored two late goals and didn’t lose.

Everyone’s least favourite team Paços Ferreira disappointed their fans by travelling all the way to Estrela da Amadora and winning.

Things are better for Trofense fans, whose team have now lost so many games that they find themselves bottom of the league. They inherited the accolade after Rio Ave foolishly decided to beat them on Sunday to move within one point of safety.

However it is Leixões who are arguably the most exciting team in the league at the moment, having lost five of their last six.

Nacional, Braga, Marítimo and Belenenses all came close to losing but only managed to draw. Tossers.

Results

Académica 0 – 3 Porto; Setúbal 0 – 4 Benfica; Guimarães 1 – 2 Sporting; Naval 1 – 0 Leixões; Rio Ave 2 -1 Trofense; Amadora 0 – 2 P. Ferreira; Nacional 1 – 1 Braga; Marítimo 1 – 1 Belenenses.

The top

Porto – 57

Sporting – 53

Benfica – 49

Nacional - 43

Braga - 42

Gdańsk – A Culture Capital

Originally published on Fingertips on 07/12/09

Perched in the north of Poland on the Baltic coast, Gdańsk is arguably Poland’s most politically and historically resonant city.
It is where the communist dictatorship over Europe began to topple, firstly with the strikes in the Lenin Shipyard and the creation of Solidarność (Solidarity) in August 1980, and then with the re-legalisation of Solidarność in April 1989 after its banning under martial law in December 1981. This was followed by the first semi-free elections since World War II in communist Europe in June 1989, when Solidarność took 99 of the 100 seats it competed for in the Senate.
Gdańsk is also where World War II began on 1st September 1939, when the Germans bombarded the Westerplatte peninsula – as documented in Günter Grass’ “The Tin Drum”. Back then the city was called Danzig by its mostly German-speaking population and was annexed by Nazi Germany.
It only became known as Gdańsk again after its liberation in March 1945 and return to Poland as part of the post-war Potsdam Agreement.
All of these upheavals make Gdańsk something of an epitome of the trials Poland suffered in the 20th century, and it is therefore somewhat appropriate that the city also stands out as the embodiment of everything good that is happening to the country in the 21st century.
It blends its history – the tall and narrow merchants’ houses – with the capitalism that is prospering in Poland in the face of the global financial crisis. A recent survey by CB Richard Ellis ranked Poland as the fourth best place for retail expansion in Europe, the Middle East and Africa in 2010, and Gdańsk is very much at the heart of that, with a glut of shopping complexes spreading from its centre down the coastline to its Tricity partners Sopot and Gdynia.
It is one of Poland’s host cities for the Euro 2012 football championships, and its top drawer transport infrastructure – trams, multi-lane roads (a rarity in Poland), ferries, and a train station throbbing with national and international connections – is what Poland’s other major cities all aspire to.
The city is also a candidate for the 2016 European Capital of Culture, is saturated in art – both in its museums and in its streets – and its Open’er music festival offers four days of live music for the bargain price of €76. The last few years have seen performances from the Arctic Monkeys, Björk, Sonic Youth, Erykah Badu and Kanye West to name but a few, and this year it made the final of the UK Festival Awards in the Best Overseas Festival category.
It is also one of Poland’s greenest cities, boasting 250 square metres of greenery per inhabitant and has a thorough cycling route reaching the other parts of the Tricity. The city’s eco-credentials are further boosted by its participation in the European Week of Balanced Transport, European Car Free Day and the Clean up the World campaign.
As Poland strides confidently into the next decade, the boots with which it strides are strapped firmly onto the feet of Gdańsk.
What makes these boots so remarkable is that they were once the boots that Orwell immortalised in “1984”, the boots “stamping on a human face – forever.”
Gdańsk pushed those boots from its face in 1989, squashed the final word in Orwell’s sentence with them, and now moves forward with a swagger in its step.

The Noughties: The Decade of “Bestism”

Originally published on Fingertips on 27/11/09

As the noughties draw to a close, people inevitably try to wrap up the decade in a convenient package, slap a label on it and sell it off as a profitable Christmas book that no one will read.

Summarising 3653 days of news, culture and everything else in processed chunks of bland generalisations is a prospect that many people, mostly journalists, find irresistible.

They make such generalisations at the end of every year, but with the closing of a decade, they think they have a licence to freak out.

There are endless Top Tens and Top 100s all over the internet that no-one in their right mind would either read or pay any serious attention to.

Just do a Google search for “noughties” and any other word, and you will be met with a list of some kind about the decade that almost was.

Even “noughties crap” brings up the highly enlightening Sexiest Women of the Noughties (So Far) on Hecklerspray, with its title which implies a woman may still be born this decade who could oust Jessica Alba from her top spot.

Hecklerspray’s list does have some hint of originality about it however, as it contains only 24 entries, rather than a round number.

The Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph and the rest would never dare produce a list that wasn’t made up of ten, 50, or 100 entries, a fact which shows not only how eager they are to fill column inches with this easy-to-produce nonsense, but how generic they are.

It’s not as if there aren’t already more than enough awards ceremonies every year that are desperate to tell us what is the best and what we should be spending our money on.

Take books for example. There are, to name but a few, The Man Booker Prize, The Costa Book Awards, The Guardian First Book Award, The Orwell Prize, and what must be the most eminent of the lot, The Galaxy British Book Awards.

The Times’ recent list, The 100 Best Books of the Decade, is little but an amalgam of the winners and shortlisted books from the last ten years of the aforementioned prizes, from 2008’s Booker winner, Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger at number 80, to 2003’s Whitbread (now known as Costa) winner, Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, at 25.

What exactly constitutes being “the best” in the eyes of The Times is left open to conjecture. Is it breaking down narrative walls in fiction? Providing insights into unknown areas? Selling the most copies?

No-one at The Times seems to know or care, but just to be safe they’ve thrown in some populist numbers — Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code at ten – some political stuff — Naomi Klein’s No Logo at 50 — and even some historical stuff — Peter Ackroyd’s London: the Biography at 45.

There really is something for everyone here, and that is why it's so dire. It’s nothing but bookcase fascism that tells you what should be on your shelves for everyone to see next time you have a dinner party.

To make a generalisation of my own, if anything, the noughties was the decade that spawned the culture of what could be called “Bestism”.

Reality TV gave us Big Brother, The X-Factor, I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! and Strictly Come Dancing, all of which are based on the premise of finding out who is “the best” and dismissing everyone else.

The newspapers’ noughties lists are lodged deeply in this vein. What they are saying is that if you don’t own or aren’t familiar with the contents of these lists, you’re not suitable to mix it with the rest of us and should be voted off the social, intellectual and hipness circuits.

Or, to turn out a phrase that somewhat epitomises noughties exclusionism, “you are the weakest link, goodbye.”

The Joey Barton brochure

Originally published on 90minutesonline on 24/06/09
In a desperate ploy to live for a few more years on a footballer’s salary, Newcastle’s Michael Owen has got his PR cronies to stick out a brochure pimping his wares.

This kind of head-on approach to matters is much more suited to his teammate Joey Barton, who is never short of word or two to say about the state of the world.

So with no further ado, here is the Joey Barton brochure.

· Barton is 26 years old and supposed to be approaching the peak of his career.

· Barton has razor sharp judgement. He told Alan Shearer in May 2009: "You’re a shit manager with shit tactics." No Newcastle fan could argue with that analysis.

· Barton called Iain Dowie "a prick" on the same occasion.

· In two years at Newcastle, Barton has racked up 32 appearances and two goals.

· Barton loves a challenge, so we asked him to figure out his goals per game record at Newcastle. After explaining the word "average" and running him through the basics of calculator usage, he took just four days to calculate a ratio of 12 goals every four games. We took the calculator back and figured out it was in fact one goal every 16 games, but you can’t knock the lad for trying.

· Barton has seven GCSEs.

· Barton, often known as "the defendant", won his first and only England cap in February 2007 when he came on as a substitute in the 1-0 defeat by Spain at Old Trafford. He is unlikely to win any more.

· In fact, Barton doesn’t want to win any more. He said after winning his one cap: "If England comes then so be it, but I have played for them once now and that'll do for me. I am more interested in winning domestic honours.” Therefore Barton will be 100% dedicated to helping your team gather some silverware, by any, and we mean any, means necessary.

· Barton is a gutsy and passionate player who literally lives, eats and breathes football. Unluckily for him this gutsy passion often spills off the pitch and in May 2008 he was sentenced to six months imprisonment for common assault and affray.

· You might think Barton is an unpopular character, but he actually has his own fan site. It might not have been updated since May 2008, but it still exists.

· Barton is currently suspended after getting a red card for a two-footed sliding tackle on Liverpoo’s Xabi Alonso. This was in Barton’s first game in over three months, proving that he doesn’t take long to get back into his stride after a lack of first team football.

· Barton was Manchester City’s number one tackler in the 2004/05 season.

· Barton once stubbed out a cigar on a reserve player’s eye during a Christmas party, but can you honestly say you’ve never done anything at a Christmas party that you didn't later regret.

· If Barton believes in something and has a passion for it, he’ll pursue it insistently. In July 2008 he received a four months suspended sentence after causing actual bodily harm to former teammate Ousmane Dabo.

· Newcastle United have suspended Barton “until further notice,” are examining employment law and "gathering evidence" for the possible termination of his contract. If Newcastle manage to effectively sack Barton, he will be a free agent.

The quarter life crisis

Originally published on "The thing is..." on 29/11/07

As has been said many times before, people these days are living faster.

Everything is about speed: journeys are faster; computers are faster; TV news is faster. We can have everything now and we bloody well want it now, including the problems that life is always ready to throw in our faces. And so we have invented the quarter life crisis. Fundamentally, it’s the mid-life crisis of the 21st century, which in itself was the 20th century’s sassier alternative to the 19th’s end-of-life crisis, which mostly entailed worrying about cobbling together enough cash to receive a proper burial, while still making sure that your plot in the graveyard has as good a view of the church steeple as your fellow deceased.

The mid-life crisis is, or was, essentially yuppie bravado that involved men in their late forties buying big red cars and having affairs with women ten years their junior. In a nutshell, it was for wankers.

The quarter-life crisis is much more the kind of thing that might end up in a Woody Allen movie – it’s all about internal strife and endless pontificating over your place in the world, and it all starts when you enter into the wonderful world of work.

Here’s the scenario. You come out of uni with your 2.1 ready to take on the world, only to find that the kind of jobs you now want require several years’ experience and that you’re more likely to end up working in Virgin Megastore or typing reports with names like ‘Admin1’. Even your most recent application got stonewalled. Why can’t you be Assistant Director of Children’s Programming at the BBC? You’ve watched CBBC religiously for the last 17 years and have even got a Going Live t-shirt – which, incidentally, all your student mates think is wicked. You’ve got Wacky Races on DVD and once directed your own version of the show using Happy Meal toys and your dad’s old camcorder.

Why can’t you be Assistant Director of Children’s Programming at the BBC? Because you’re an idiot.

Up to now you’ve been wrapped up in cotton wool. As a child you would draw pictures that would look like vomit on paper, yet have your parents decorate your kitchen with them and tell their friends how much potential they show. At school you’d come fourth in some competition or other and get a giant pat on the back and extra pocket money. Now you’ve got your 2.1 and your groundbreaking dissertation yet people think you’re shit and don’t even want you around their offices long enough to have an interview.

The message is for the first time in your life being pronounced loudly and clearly: YOU STINK!!

And to top things off there are those relatively few successful youngsters who are there seemingly just to heap more pain on the rest of us. When you start to realise that you’re too old to get in the England football team, when novelists appear who are younger than you, when it turns out that actresses you’ve vigorously tossed off over in your lonely bed could get you in trouble with the law if your dreams became reality, you’re inevitably going to feel like you’ve missed the boat.

So how is your ego supposed to handle this enormous blow? Just like you came to terms with Santa Claus being pure fabrication and Blue Peter not catering to your interests any longer. By finding a different reality to inhabit.

Many people take gap years, some go back to uni to do vocational degrees – others hook up with a rich old person and sacrifice a few years of their dignity for flaccid sex and wads of interest. Whichever of these routes you choose, the tidings are good. In fact, as long as you choose to steer yourself away from the world of work, you’re onto a winner.

Just look at the statistics. Today, life expectancy is 82 for a British male and 85 for a female, which is a damn sight better than the 48 and 50 you would’ve been onto the end of had you been born in 1900. Why the rise, we may be inclined to ask? Because of living conditions; because of health and hygiene? Nope. Because of the age that we start working.

Today, most people become slaves to the wage in their early 20s after bagging their special pieces of paper from former polytechnics. 100 years ago, kids would be off to work aged ten. In both cases, the age we can expect to die is approximately four times the age we start work, and thus the longer we can put off working, the longer we can expect to live and to stave off our quarter life crises.

Why are there so many ancient professors? Why is life-expectancy in the third-world and the sweatshop capitals of the world so much lower than in the western world? Because of the ages that these people start working.

The kids in India are having their quarter life crises at 12, reading Salinger and toiling away making Gap clothes trying to raise enough to go Inter-Railing for a month in the summer, while their western counterparts are hanging around with nothing better to do than check whether their first pubes have sprouted and push shopping trolleys into rivers. Why do the working classes tend to have kids younger? Because they’re going through their quarter life crisis and are searching for a means of justifying their existence, which the 20-something middle class kids can do by starting an MA in Applications of Photography on Cafe Walls or by travelling.

As for the rest of us, we can just go and label up the latest "two for £10" promotion or have that file logged by 5 o'clock.

What the fans have to say: AFC Wimbledon

Originally published on 90minutesonline on 25/09/09

Rising from the ashes of Wimbledon FC’s decision to relocate to Milton Keynes and become Milton Keynes Dons, AFC Wimbledon formed in 2002.

Having won promotion four times in seven seasons the club now play in the Blue Square Premier and are just one promotion away from League Two. Impressively, AFC Wimbledon also hold the record for most consecutive games unbeaten by a senior football club with a whopping 78.

90minutesonline spoke to Robert Dunford, editor of SW19’s Army – The Politically Unsound AFC Wimbledon Fanzine, about his team and his hopes for this season.

How happy are you with the season so far?

Pretty happy thus far. Once we got into the rhythm of playing at a higher level we seemed to cope well enough.

We played at Kettering and got a bit of a battering at times, but we won 2-1 which seemed to make us believe we could do something this season.

The way we've adapted has been the biggest plus point of the season, even if at the moment we have had too many draws.

What are you expecting from this season?

Mid-table mediocrity, maybe a push towards the playoffs if we get lucky or everyone suddenly clicks together. Anything beyond that will be considered a bonus, though a couple of decent cup runs too would be nice.

I think most of us wouldn't mind a couple of consolidation seasons simply to have a rest.

What are your greatest fears for this season?

Relegation would be a massive blow to the collective psyche of AFC Wimbledon and its supporters.

The mid-term aim since 2002 has been to get into the Blue Square Premier and to go down from it would hurt big time. A quick glance at the table suggests we might be okay.

Losing our best players to bigger paying teams higher up is also something we don't want to happen, although we'll cope with that when it eventually happens. Everyone else does.

Who’s your best player and why?

Danny Kedwell. He’s strong up front, knows where the goal is and is willing to help out in midfield when they're not firing, which is most of the time at the moment.

Defenders Paul Lorraine, Chris Hussey and Brett Johnson deserve honourable mentions as well.

And which player would you gladly see the back of? And why?

Nobody really, but unfortunately a couple of the Ryman Premier stalwarts we still have might be living on borrowed time unless they make the step up before January. For some reason Sam Hatton gets a lot of stick from people.

If you could sign one player from another team in the Blue Square Premier, who would it be and why?

In all honesty nobody has really stuck out for me so far. Curse the lack of TV coverage of the Blue Square Premier.

What’s AFC Wimbledon’s best terrace chant?

The Champagne Song, created in the Wimbledon FC dog days of 2000-02, sums us up to a tee. It manages to be slightly self-deprecating, is certainly lairy and slags off the opposition at the same time.

It’s sadly unrepeatable on this site, but is sung to the tune of Rod Stewart's "Sailing" and starts off "We are Wombles".

Again, a couple more honourable mentions.

Firstly, a Danny Kedwell one that's started up this season which involves up to 30 people bouncing at the end of it, depending on whether they can be bothered enough to do it.

Secondly, "I Can't Help Falling In Love With You". Not original, but people love to sing it and it does put the hairs on your neck up a bit.

What half-time snacks do you recommend at Kingsmeadow?

Kingsmeadow is standard football fayre, so make of that what you will. That said, I did have a nice double cheeseburger with onions at a game last year. Mind you, I was perhaps too hungry.

What are your best and worst memories of supporting AFC Wimbledon?
The best is the very first game of the AFC Wimbledon era at Sutton United [a 4-0 defeat in July 2002 in front of 4,657 fans].

Winning the Ryman Premier playoff at Staines, winning promotion to the Blue Square Premier at Hampton and Richmond and beating Aldershot and Gravesend and Northfleet in the FA Trophy in the same season all stand out as well.

Along with actually being able to support a club that wasn't trying to attack you every single day.

The worst are Darlogate, where an international clearance form cost us 18 points; getting kicked out of the FA Trophy and realising the concept of a "drinking club".

Windsor and Eton at home in February 2006 was a crap game in horrible conditions that made me realise how dire this level of football could be. As far away from Liverpool vs Wimbledon FC as you could get.

If you could change one thing at AFC Wimbledon, what would it be?

Leaving aside ground issues, I think some of our fans need to be a bit more realistic (or less dogmatic) over funding.

We'll need it more and more and you can't expect the fan base to constantly pay out ever increasing sums of money. No matter the "principle" of owning your own club.

To be fair AFC Wimbledon itself seems to have grasped this a lot more than some supporters

Where are AFC Wimbledon going to be in five years’ time?

Hopefully making plans to return to Wimbledon, playing in the Football League with healthy crowds and making a certain team from Buckinghamshire very nervous.

Facing the music

Originally published on 90minutesonline on 28/08/09

The new Europe League is many things.

It’s Europe’s second best club competition. It’s the UEFA Cup. It’s the refuge of the damned, (ie, Celtic) and it’s now the proud owner of a wanky anthem.

The piece by Yohann Zveig and the Paris Opera was premiered at Friday’s Europa League draw and is “distinctive” according to the UEFA website, “giving a sense of the atmosphere that will be felt immediately before a UEFA Europa League game”.

Cue a snide comment about the atmosphere immediately before a UEFA Europa League game between, say, Lille and Genoa.

The first two seconds of the tune sound like the Three Tenors’ piece from Italia 90, but it quickly drifts into an advert for an airline as the voiceover in your head says: “Imagine flying at 64,000 feet. Imagine watching a Ben Affleck movie. Imagine eating out of a box like a mental patient.”

It then trips into a driving staccato number, backed by a heavy drumbeat worthy of a generic program about Africa on BBC World before adding a rising “weee” noise and Casio keyboard vocals that turn it into the introduction to the Wednesday night National Lottery draw.

Now I’m no music critic, but I think calling this “the perfect soundtrack to an amazing show” is something of an exaggeration.

Yet if we look beyond the music and the prospect of Lille vs Genoa, this season's Europa League has actually thrown up some quite exciting prospects.

The draw

The English neutral will find Fulham’s group of Roma, Basel and CSKA Sofia something of a mouth-watering prospect, made more exciting by dint of Roy Hodgson’s Fulham rather than the standard Aston Villa being in the mix. Fulham have shown they’re not afraid to play real football, and their efforts in this competition should be worth watching.

Elsewhere Everton’s placement in a group with Belarusian BATE Borisov and something of a resurgent Benfica should test the scousers with both an Eastern European winter bruising and a semi-tropical test of defensive awareness. AEK Athens won’t exactly be pushovers either.

One of Portugal’s other teams in this competition, Sporting Lisbon, unluckily missed out on the Champions League to Fiorentina on away goals. They should view this as a blessing though, as the teams in the Europa League are closer to their level and won’t dish out a 12-1 hammering to them as Bayern Munich did in last year’s Champions League.

Heerenveen, Hertha Berlin and Latvian side FK Ventspils will test their mettle instead, but Sporting should make it to at least the last 16 if they can hang on to João Moutinho and Miguel Veloso.

Other groups to watch are group J, which features last year’s UEFA Cup winners Shakhtar Donetsk, and group H which pits "Schteve" McClaren’s FC Twente against Fenerbahçe - home to Roberto Carlos, former Newcastle player Emre Belozoglu and Colin Kazim-Richards - Steaua Bucharest and Moldovan giants FC Sheriff.

Sheriff have won nine domestic titles on the bounce, six Moldovan cups and were the first Moldovan team to win an international title when they bagged the Commonwealth of Independent States Cup in 2003. They won it again this year, but no amount of Moldovan silver is likely to make them anyone’s favourites for the Europa League.

The relatively local rivalry between Panathinaikos and Galatasaray in Group F should also be worth keeping an eye on.

How it works

The Europa Cup’s 12 groups of four will be whittled down to 32 teams in December when the first and second-placed teams go through from their groups to a knock out phase along with the eight third-placed teams from the Champions League.

The tournament then rattles through a standard knock-out format until someone wins it in Hamburg on May 12^th.

The bookies fancy Roma, Hamburg, Villarreal, Everton and Werder Bremen, although much as it pains me to say it a newly-invigorated Benfica boasting Javier Saviola, Oscar Cardozo, Hassan Yebda and Angel Di Maria could be there come the end.

New coach Jorge Jesus got Braga to the last 16 last year and has the ability to go much further with a better side, which Benfica under him undoubtedly are. Although having said that Braga are currently top of the Portuguese Liga Sagres.

Whatever happens, some lucky buggers will be dancing away to Yohann Zveig’s anthem in a German beer hall, while others will be thinking about their flight home, at 64,000 feet, watching a Ben Affleck movie and eating out of a box like a mental patient.

How the mighty have fallen: World Cup play-offs

Originally published on Fingertips on 25/11/09

Last week’s World Cup play-offs provided one moment of controversy in the shape of Thierry Henry’s hand.

But we already know that footballers cheat, so why was this incident particularly horrific? Because of the cost that Ireland paid – a place in the World Cup and many millions of euros? Or because it was Henry, the man we all thought was a model professional, who so blatantly cheated.

Henry’s refusal to confess to the referee immediately after the incident saw him throw away the chance “to right a wrong. To be a man,” according to Richard Williams in the Guardian. For many the Frenchman’s reputation has now been tarnished forever, with the delight and pleasure that he brought to so many through his dazzling displays during eight years at Arsenal now rendered null and void in the face of his barefaced dishonesty.

But looking beyond this one flashpoint the four play-offs provided significant evidence of how not just Henry’s fortunes but those of some of Europe’s biggest teams and figures have taken a turn for the worse.

France were reduced to an extra-time handball in order to qualify, nine years after dominating the football world by doing the World Cup 1998 and Euro 2000 double.

Portugal, once the scourge of England and feared by many, were reduced to scraping through their group and a narrow play-off win over Bosnia-Hercegovina.

Carlos Quieroz will probably be shown the door after what in all likelihood will be a poor World Cup campaign. To be fair, he doesn’t really have the players to succeed, but his managerial shortcomings don’t help either.

The team he fielded against Bosnia was sturdy enough at the back, with Porto’s Bruno Alves and Real Madrid’s Pepe alongside Chelsea’s Ricardo Carvalho, but lacked even a sniff of the talent going forward that Portuguese sides were blessed with in the days of their so-called Golden Generation.

Back then Figo, Rui Costa and Pauleta ripped sides apart, but now there’s only Porto hardman Raul Meireles, Manchester United outcast Nani, Brazilian-born forward Liedson and Atletico Madrid midget Simao Sabrosa.

Yes, they have Cristiano Ronaldo to come back, but he can’t carry a side that are so bereft of sizzle in every other department.

Russia and Guus Hiddink both failed to make it past Slovenia. It is the first time Hiddink has failed to get a team to a major tournament, and it’s a shame that the truly brilliant Andrei Arshavin won’t be gracing the field in South Africa.

His presence lit up Euro 2008 as Russia swashbuckled their way to the semi-finals, beating Holland 3-1 in a quarter final that provided arguably one of the greatest performances of recent times.

Finally, Greece, who sort of made everyone think they were great by winning Euro 2004 after a string of 1-0 wins, executed the same boring-but-effective game plan to come through 1-0 winners against Ukraine.

Their dirty tactics and tight 4-5-1 formation stifled a below par Ukraine and frankly the prospect of them in the World Cup is not going to excite anyone.

Although Ukraine are inconsistent and underperformed in the 2006 World Cup, they have some fantastic players, including Bayern Munich’s Anatoliy Tymoschuk, who can set a game on fire.

Greece on the other hand have a team of firemen and a lumbering firetruck of a coach in Otto Rehhagel, all of whom are prepared to extinguish any sparks of excitement in a game by closing down a team and swinging for their ankles.

The once mighty have fallen, but not far enough to keep most of them out of the World Cup. Still, the group stages will probably prove one hurdle too many for France and Portugal, although I have a sneaking suspicion that Greece might slog their way a little bit further.