Looking forward to a half-time video link-up with the England camp? Karl Sturgeon isn't

It’s easy to be cynical about modern football, so I’d like to begin with a positive statement – the World Cup is great. Even if you missed out on FIFA’s wheeze of selling match tickets in South African supermarkets and won’t be there yourself, the competition gives the summer shape. I doubt I’m the only person impatiently awaiting the World Cup wallcharts so that barbecues, beach trips and weddings can be slotted into the gaps between group deciders, or quarter-finals B and C.

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Taylor Parkes watches a new film about Italia 90, a tournament that has assumed huge nostalgic significance for the English game

First published in 1991, Pete Davies’s All Played Out is still an astonishing read. An account of the author’s travels through Italy in a blazing World Cup summer, intercut with fly-on-the-wall stuff from an England camp to which he was granted an insane level of access (the subsequent tightening up is due in part to Davies himself, whose honesty cast the game’s top brass in a less than flattering light).

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David Stubbs runs the rule over this summer's musical offerings and finds a distinct lack of national pride swelling in his chest. Quite the opposite

 Time was when it was possible for the relevant authorities to frogmarch the England team en masse to the studio to record the official England song, in which they would assure us, back home, that this time they were going to get it right, their stilted choral tones betraying an appropriate lack of conviction that they wouldn’t come up short around the quarter-final mark.

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This could be a critical summer at Old Trafford. Ashley Shaw looks at the Glazer protests so far and wonders what lies ahead

By the time Manchester United next kick a ball, they could be playing under a benign coalition of wealthy fans, backed by a support confident of a bright future. There would be a fans’ voice at the upper echelons of the club, with a “golden share” allocated to them to ensure that the pillage of the club never happens again. The £790 million debt loaded on to the club will have been assessed and plans put in place to pay it down. Management fees and dividends would be waived in an emergency budget in order that the club return to an even keel. And before an ecstatic crowd, Wayne Rooney’s first act under the new owners would be to take the kick-off, beat every member of the Liverpool team before backheeling the ball into an empty net…

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Ian Plenderleith examines a philosophical approach to the game which could make watching international football more bearable for England fans

As we approach the World Cup and lose all sense of proportion about football’s importance, it’s worth asking just why we follow the game at all. A column by Andrew Guest at pitchinvasion.net asked a pertinent hypothetical question: If England win the World Cup, will their fans be any happier one year from now than if they had been knocked out in the second round by a goal that Carlos Tevez surreptitiously bundled in with his fist?

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