Saturday 1 Mick McCarthy is delighted with Ireland’s comeback against Cameroon: “There’s been a lot talked about the spirit and camaraderie and I think that has been shown today.” Niall Quinn claims he tried to get Roy Keane to return but couldn’t persuade him to phone McCarthy: “I’ll never understand why Roy didn’t make even a lukewarm attempt.”
The Archive
Articles from When Saturday Comes. All 27 years of WSC are in the process of being added. This may take a while.
Uli Hesse-Lichtenberger explains why Rudi Völler's battlers were different from their predecessors, and how they made him care about the national side again
Sometime around a quarter to three on Friday, June 21, I caught myself slowly and silently rocking back and forth. Even my son, a nervous chatterbox less than two hours earlier, was very quiet. He is only 12, and at that age it’s not only normal to support your national team but perhaps even, well, healthy. So I kept my mouth shut because there was nothing positive to say and I didn’t want to foster a cynical image by saying something negative. All the more so since there were plenty of other people already doing that.
The World Cup produced some truly awful TV. Cameron Carter relives the BBC's late-night shocker, while Barney Ronay laments the humiliation of Paul Gascoigne
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I admit it doesn’t take too much to appear the clever one in a broadcasting partnership with Denise van Outen or Kelly Brook, but Johnny Vaughan has been funny and will be funny again (like our plucky England team, he’s relatively young). It is, however, becoming increasingly difficult to find people who still believe this. Like his recent sitcom ’Orrible, Johhny Vaughan’s World Cup Extra provided fewer moments of pleasure than a motivational talk from a reformed crack addict.
David O'Byrne saw the Turkey outdo all World Cup expectations despite Hakan Sukur's baleful influence
Before the start of the World Cup, few Turks had expected their team to last as far as the semi-finals. After the first two group matches, that number had shrunk considerably. As a scenario of failure, relinquishing a one-goal lead not once but twice had a distinctly familiar ring. A decade of senselessly chucking away promising positions was capped last November when Turkey gifted Sweden two goals in the last three minutes of the final qualifying match, leaving them to face a play-off against Austria.
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.