Articles from When Saturday Comes. All 27 years of WSC are in the process of being added. This may take a while.
With Japan and Korea all done and dusted, have England lost their element of surprise? We look cautiously back over a very different World Cup
It’s always tempting to read too much into a World Cup, especially in its immediate aftermath. Who would have thought in 1990, for example, that such a turgid tournament, littered with violence on and off the pitch, would be the prelude to a decade of soaring interest and fantastic wealth in English football?
Gabriele Marcotti, who predicted the poor displays of France and Argentina in WSC two months ago, attempts to sort World Cup fact from fiction
For a competition that lasts 31 days – and one in which half the teams play just three matches – it’s quite remarkable that the World Cup is held in such high esteem as a barometer of footballing trends and relative strength. Especially a competition such as this one, where poor refereeing and bizarre episodes saw the World Cup lose a host of juggernauts (or potential juggernauts) before the quarter-finals, as fans of Portugal, Nigeria, Argentina, Italy and France will confirm. Still, this was not a 64-match exercise in futility. Once the hype subsides and the pundits go back to spouting the obvious about players whose names they can actually pronounce, we’ll be left with a neat set of memories we can stow in the back of our consciousness.
This time there was no one else to blame, but that hasn't stopped some people believing England are on the verge of something great. Cris Freddi begs to differ
No need for a blow-by-blow: we all saw the same tournament. When England managed to protect a lead, they had shape and substance. When they didn’t, it wasn’t pretty. Denmark self-destructed and Nigeria didn’t matter, but Argentina was one of the great ones, a spookily complete payback. No coincidence, surely, that it was played under cover, in controlled conditions – and that it bucketed down for Denmark.
Many Irish fans seem to think Mick McCarthy's squad did pretty well to reach the last 16. Paul Doyle says they should have higher standards
The Japanese World Cup organising committee voted Ireland’s fans the best of the tournament, and yes, the Green Army spread the word craic with great gusto. But were all Irish supporters a “credit to their nation”? What, for example, are we to make of the 100,000 who gathered with giddy delight in Dublin’s Phoenix Park to greet Mick McCarthy’s “heroes” on their return home? What were these strange folks saying about their country’s ambitions? Perhaps it was something like: “Anything above naked humilation will do for us.”
Al Needham isn't ashamed to admit he was an ITV Digital subscriber. Here he recalls the channel's highlights – that's the first two paragraphs anyway
When ITV (née ON) Digital was launched in autumn 1998, it seemed a very appealing offer to the televisual tat aficionado such as myself. You could get WWF and back-to-back episodes of On The Buses without throwing any cash directly into the maw of Rupert Murdoch, and you only had to plug it in and ring a call centre to get connected.