The Archive

An anti-climatic exit, injured star player and end of an era – the next World Cup hosts need to improve. Robert Shaw explains

Brazilians don’t anticipate winning every World Cup. But they do at least expect to bask in their technical superiority until a defensive howler denies the assumed divine right to be world champions. Frustration at losing to Holland – opponents overcome in 1994 and 1998 – was compounded by the sense that the Dutch posed the biggest hurdle to Brazil’s fourth final appearance in five World Cups.

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At the 2010 World Cup, England underperformed at a major tournament. Again. Although the same solutions are called for, nothing seems to change

All the stock phrases came out as England staggered through the group stage at the 2010 World Cup en route to a second-round mercy killing in Bloemfontein. The team just needed to step up, the pundits said, play at their best, find their real form. However limp the performances might be, there is still a belief than an England team should be able to compete on equal terms with the best international sides at any given time.

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This year saw the first ever Champions League final held on a Saturday. Alan Tomlinson considers the real reasons for a switch from mid-week

It was all over by the Monday. At 1pm the desks were down in Madrid’s Westin Palace Hotel, the signs to the UEFA operations room were all gone, only the occasional Ford – proudly boasting its longevity as a UEFA Champions League sponsor – pulled up outside the hotel, and the fleet of luxury VIP coaches had disappeared. The noticeboards in the hotel lobbies announced business as usual for the dealmakers of the corporate world, or the richer end of the conference business.

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Often contested by recent Premier League competitors, this year's Championship play-off final featured two clubs who last played in the top division in 1971 and 1962 respectively. Cameron Carter reports

Wembley, on a luridly hot day in May. Almost lost among the blue and tangerine hordes, down for this afternoon’s promotion showdown, glimpses of everyday north London life – the dreaming bouncers outside pubs, the Wembley branch of the school-age outdoor drinking club soliciting help to buy alcohol, the brightly-plumed, chirpy Lidl in the retail park. For the most part, though, this pocket of London is just Cardiff and Blackpool, ribbons of blue and tangerine filing magnetically towards the Wembley arch.

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Three years ago, Jens Heilmann began a project to photograph the footballs used in every World Cup final. From the introduction to a new book, The World Cup Balls, Norbert Thomma describes how they were painstakingly tracked down

Internet searches on World Cup footballs showed only that they had been badly photographed. There was scant information about the originals. Apparently the world was only interested in goals and artistic overhead kicks, in saved penalties and vicious fouls, in posing winners and fallen idols. But the single item they all fight over was often ignored.

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