As Matthew Le Tissier calls it a day, Cris Freddi looks back on some of the other players who have been almost great, but not quite, in his tricky position

So goodbye then, Le Tiss. Thanks for the sequence of great individual goals that season. If you’d got yourself injured there and then, we’d have called it a really big loss, someone who had the makings of a great player. Instead, they’re saying you didn’t have enough ambition to leave an unfashionable club. I think that’s bollocks personally, but we all agree that something went AWOL in the last few years.

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There's a World Cup coming up, apparently, so we invited three well-travelled journalists to make some rash predictions about what will happen. As a Swede based in London Marcus Christenson has ties to two of the countries in Group F. Gabriele Marcotti has lived in Japan and how tries to explain English football to Italians and vice-versa. Alan Duncan reports regularly on Nigeria and Cameroon, who face England and Ireland respectively, as well as the three other African qualifiers

Are playing styles and tactics are becoming more homogeneous throughout the world, because most of the top players are playing in the same leagues? If so, does that make the World Cup less interesting?
Gabriele Marcotti There’s a greater uniformity. Not just in the way teams play, but also in how they train. If you look at the size of the Italian or Spanish players, they are now as big as the northern Europeans are expected to be. Everybody’s an athlete. Some of the English play­ers still get drunk and irresponsible but the impression I get with players like Beckham and Owen is that they train seriously and take care of their diet. In some ways it has become more uniform, but in a positive way – the level of fitness has definitely increased everywhere.

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Manchester City would tell you that their championship has been very well earned. Their city neighbours on the floor above, who risk being outdone in the Manchester trophy count, would probably beg to differ. Two writers air their views

Yes~
The First Division in 2000-01 was notable for the presence of two outstanding teams (Ful­ham and Blackburn), one that was just that bit better than the rest but not quite as good as the two above (Bolton) and then a whole host of similar teams (perm any three from about eight for the remaining play-off places).

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Ken Gall gives a resounding cheer for the exasperated Scottish Premier League chairmen who finally stuck two fingers up at Rangers and Celtic

To anyone who says that there are no surprises left in Scottish football, the events of April 16 will have been the cause of some bemusement. In what might seem at first glance to be the equivalent of the Christians expelling Jesus from Christianity, all the Scottish Premier League clubs, with the exception of Celtic and Rangers, gave notice of their intention to resign en masse from the league in two seasons’ time, leaving Glas­­gow’s much-loved double act, not for the first time, in a world of their own.

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After 70 years, Tooting & Mitcham United are moving home. Andy Lyons reports

A Ryman League First Division fixture be­tween Tooting & Mitcham United and Wealdstone wouldn’t normally draw a thousand peo­ple, or anywhere near. Most of the crowd on April 20 had come specifically to see the last competitive match at Sandy Lane, Too­ting’s home since 1932 and the last of the big non-League grounds left in London. Chair­man John Buffoni has taken the brave step of striking a business deal with Ron Noades, as a re­sult of which the club will begin next season at a new stadium built on Crystal Palace’s old training ground two miles away across south London.

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