Two defenders block his path to goal; there is no way through, unless.

A step-over and flick through the tinniest of gaps, a burst of speed, a blur of bright yellow boots.

At full pace now, he glides past a despairing tackle, surveys the evolving scene ahead of him and everything slows down.

The most precise of chips sends the ball soaring towards the unguarded back post.

A hopeless dive, a desperate touch and the goalkeeper has put the ball into his own net.

This is not the same Luís Carlos Almeida da Cunha.

Nani has been reborn.

The excitement building up to the much-hyped raffle was because South Africa  2010 is still seven months away so it brought everything slightly closer.

Obviously we know who everyone is going to play, but the anticipation has been tempered rather than increased.

While the world awaited the draw – I still don’t know what happened when the second pot of teams were being drawn, they seemed to be allocated random groups – the race to hold the 2018 competition was in full swing.

Each entrant was given the chance to promote their bid with a short video and by all accounts the England bid team’s effort was rubbish.

The England 2018 bid has already been riddled with in-fighting and cock-ups, but after streamlining their campaign force they should have been better placed to acheive what sounds like a simple task.

Bring the World Cup back to England.

We created the game, we’ve got THE best stadiums and the best fans.

Oh and the Premier League, that’s good too.

So why oh why, did Lord Treeman and Co decide to show a cartoon for their promotional video?

Australia had Nicole Kidman on theirs. We had some fat South Park style kids walking up Wembley Way!!!

This just isn’t good enough.

The video should have shown the stadiums, the fans, the goals and the passion.

All this effort shows is that the bid team are still as arrogant as when we lost the race to host the 2006 edition.

Everyone may already know about our great footballing infrastructure, but why not take the opportunity to show them again and again.

Show them footage of Old Trafford or Anfield on a European night.

Show them footage of all the fans going to a League One match.

Show them footage of the real-life fans that flood Wembley Way.

A cartoon suggests that Lord Coe has pointed the bid team towards the same people that produced the London 2012 logo.

Remember the 2012 logo? The pink thing. I’m guessing it’s the same design team.

They may have well used Microsoft Paint like this.

The video should have been in 3D!

FIFA have just announced that the World Cup will be broadcast in 3D for the first time.

3D movies, such as Avatar, are everywhere and our very own (ignoring the fact that Murdoch is Australian) Sky Sports are leading the way in 3D.

A 3D video presentation would have blown the FIFA delegates away.

Imagine them all, standing outside the England 2018 bid booth in their 3D glasses, ducking out of the way of a Wayne Rooney shot.

Not only would they be able to see all our amazing stadiums but they would be able to wonder at the scale in glorious HD with depth (yes I am already saving up for my 3D tv).

Luckily England’s trump card David Beckham saved the day.

Beckham – I won’t mention his ridiculous haircut – arrived just as the video finished and hopefully everyone forgot about the pathetic cartoon straight away as they were struck by Beckham wonder.

In fact, the presentations decended into I’m a Celebrity with different bids parading their famous backer and the delegates going starry eyed when the likes of Luis Figo entered the room.

Figo’s arrival came half way through the USA video and the watchers (pathetically) left the American both to follow Figo to the Portugal stand.

Everyone loves Becks and all the FIFA types want to meet him so getting him to take part in the draw was a big plus for the London 2018 gang.

However, all they really need to do is get Beckham to talk to each of the FIFAs with a vote personally and ask them to vote for us.

They’d all say yes. None of the FIFAs could say no to Becks.

It’d even work on England hater Jack Warner.

The FIFA Vice President has always been very anti-England and always takes every opportunity to take a dig at the fact that Britain has five football federations.

The CONCACAF President was the England’s bid strongest opponent, but has now changed his mind after meeting Gordon Brown.

No-one in England likes Gordon Brown, but apparently the PM still has some star power around the World so imagine how Warner will react when he gets to meet Beckham.

Beckham has nothing to do for the next month as he waits to re-join AC Milan meaning he has plenty of time to get us the 2018 World Cup.

If he is successful in his mission it will be the most heroic thing the Manchester United graduate has done since beating Greece on his own all those years ago.

If the FA come across this then this writer is happy to help with the bid.

And one more thing, Jeff Stelling should do the draw. That would be brilliant.

Excitement, optimism, tension. There is nothing quite like the start of the new season.

Fans return to their spiritual home eager to see how their team will fare this time around, full of belief, full of confidence.

This will be the year.

The new signing will make the difference, the young starlet will make the grade, the injury prone striker will stay off the treatment table long enough to prove everyone wrong.

We’ll stay up, we’ll get into Europe, we’ll win the league.

The whistle blows, tackles fly-in, a shot, a goal. Delight for some, despair for others.

With the transfer window open there's plenty of speculation surrounding Karim Benzema's future

Transfer windows may not be the most popular of recent developments in the world of football, but personally I quite like them. First off they set boundaries by giving managers a squad of players to work with and mould. Secondly youngsters should get more of a chance to come through as it’s no longer possible to simply go and out and buy what a manager thinks they need, as was so common pre-windows. I’ve just read the fantastic Damned United and thought it was ridiculous that teams could once go out and buy a new player as soon as they lost a game or someone got injured. It makes no sense financially and makes a mockery of the time and money invested into youth development.

Finally transfer windows mean transfer gossip. From the sublime to the ridiculous, speculation about arrivals and departure get us through the cold of January and the football barren summer months. We love hearing which players may be joining our team or who may be shown the exit. Now that it’s no longer possible for managers to buy players whenever they want the pressure of bringing in the right person is phenomenal. Clubs at all levels have to make sure they get players who will improve the quality of their team and have cover in every position for the whole season, well until the January transfer window anyway.

The difficulty of bringing in new players during the windows is intensified by the fact that almost every other team in the world is restricted by the same deadlines. Scouting is also so good these days that if a player is identified and available then there will be plenty of teams trying to snap him up and plenty of fans looking out for news that he’ll be heading to their club. That’s if his club are prepared to sell him of course. Clubs know how hard it is to sign a player so push the transfer price up because they’ll probably have just has much of a problem signing a replacement. This is especially prevalent during the January window where teams only have four weeks to improve their squad.

Transfer gossip gives us a prelude to what is ahead in the new season. It gives us some idea how teams will line-up and play in the new campaign. Some of it is utter nonsense but most has some substance. Often agents looking for better contracts for their clients will leak a news story saying that the player is on the verge of a move elsewhere or players on the transfer list will try and advertise their availability. Or there is the Florentino Perez approach. Simply tell the world’s media the players you are going to sign. Hoping to sign would be more accurate.

The Real Madrid president has regained control of one of the world’s biggest clubs after an absence of three years. The construction billionaire was at the helm during the Galactico era and is now looking to repeat the experiment in his second stint. His election comes of the back of protracted self-promotion in the Spanish media where he said that he was going to sign Manchester United midfielder Cristiano Ronaldo and said that a deal for the mercurial winger was already done. The stories didn’t stop, but now that he is in power he has denied such claims and gone after Kaka.

Of course he still want Ronaldo, he’s just trying to make friends so that he can sign the players he wants for his team. Kaka, Ronaldo, Franck Ribery, David Villa, David Silva are all great players but it will take more than public relations for Perez to see his dream team in action.

It’s easy to get caught up in all the speculation and excitement especially when a player you want to see at your club is involved. The stories that continually surround Ronaldo’s future are infuriating because the midfielder has constantly said that he wants to stay. Why would he want to go to Madrid anyway? The team are rubbish, their players aren’t as well conditioned and the league is much slower than the famous Premier League. He says he’s happy and wants to be the best in the world so surely he’ll be staying. Or am I just being naive? Has Ronaldo simply lied for the past 10 months since United rejected Real’s protracted approaches last summer.

The gossip that I would like to see come true is the talk of United signing Karim Benzema. The young French striker is a fantastic player and would be a great addition to the champions’ line-up. At £30 million he’d be much better value than Carlos Tevez who despite the hype is simply not worth the £25 million asking prize. Tevez may run around alot but he gives the ball away too easily when playing on his own up front and for a striker doesn’t attack the near post enough, if ever.

One transfer that I don’t want to see happen is Liverpool signing the enigmatic Spanish winger David Silva as a quality player on the left would really make them a force to be reckoned with. Their current financial problems will hopefully mean that transfer doesn’t happen. In contrast I’d like to see Aston Villa make a move for West Brom midfielder Chris Brunt. I’ve not seen any rumours about it but he’d be a good addition to a thin squad.

However one article that has proved to be successful was the blog I posted about American soccer player Nik Besagno. The young defender was highlighted as a future star at a very early age but only played a handful of games in the MLS. It seems that plenty of people have also been interested to know what happened to a one time first overall draft pick.

Well in the words of the great Brian Clough’s dedicated assistant Peter Taylor, “I found him.” The defender was cut following a trial with the Seattle Sounders before they started their debut MLS season and has stayed in the North West region of the USA. He’s playing for the Tacoma Tide, a Premier Development League sie in Washington State. The PDL is the fourth tier of US soccer and predominantly features college players.

The power of English football is affecting the European game

It wasn’t long ago that English clubs feared their European counterparts. They were the enthusiastic juniors eager to learn from their superiors, showing potential but lacking the experience and technical ability needed in world football’s major club competition, the Champions League. But things have changed, and I’m not sure it’s a good thing.

The first round of the Champions League knockout stages showed one thing very clearly, the four Premier League sides are much stronger than their continental cousins. The media, and their experts whose judgement we so readily trust, told us that Inter Milan, the consecutive champions of Italy, would match and possibly even beat the English, European and World Champions Manchester United. Instead we witnessed United outclass the Nerazzurri so completely, and so comfortably, that it could have been 3-0 at half time if not for the excellence of their goalkeeper Julio Cesar.

Elsewhere Chelsea strolled past one time powerhouse Juventus, Arsenal overwhelmed Roma (they just couldn’t finish all their chances) and Liverpool cruised past the mighty Real Madrid at the Bernabéu. Madrid had just smashed Real Betis 6-1 the following weekend, but lacked spark, passion and belief when they came up against a Liverpool side that needed a late goal to draw with Manchester City in their last league game.

All four English sides are on course to make to the next stage and it will be a major surprise if any one of them doesn’t do just that. But surely that’s a good thing? It shows how strong our sides are, how powerful the Premier League has become. This is all well and good and something to celebrate, but it has come at a price. The growth of the Premier League has impacted the strength of every other European league, and the technical football they once displayed.

The balance of power has shifted for two reasons. First, and somewhat tritely, the British underdog spirit. I know it sounds corny but it’s true. Our coaches had enough of being to made to look foolish on the international stage so they did something about it. They watched, they listened and they learnt. They asked what we needed to do to be successful in Europe and they changed accordingly. Diets and training regimes are now improvements of what they were already doing abroad and we’ve abandoned the gung-ho football that brought Manchester Untied the European Cup in 1999, for a more reserved, tactical and counter attacking style.

Reason number two is simple, the power and wealth of the Premier League. The big English clubs are now so dominant and rich, and have such extensive scouting networks, that they go out and buy the best players. After the abolishment of restrictions governing the number of foreign players in your team, they went and bought the best available players for each position. Often these players come from the best European clubs meaning that as the English teams get stronger the European sides get weaker.

The consequence of this imbalance, and this decline in European football standards is that the Champions League, the glowing light in the world game, will also suffer. The excitement before a big European game is immense, the drama promises to be spectacular, but if the opponents from Italy and Spain can no longer compete then perhaps the magic will wain too.

Perhaps there is hope however. Although it is unlikely we will see a talented and tactical outfit win the Champions League again anytime soon as Porto did under Jose Mourinho, there is a side out there with the talent and flair to really test our sides. Barcelona are the chosen ones. They are destroying La Liga and have genuine quality throughout their side. Their strikeforce of Messi, Henry and Eto’o is frightening and in midfield they have the Spanish duo of Iniesta and Xavi that mocked England in the recent friendly.

European football used to be a real test and I fear that it could become too easy for the supremely powerful English giants. UEFA and FIFA want to reintroduce player quotas, which would certainly have an affect, but is unlikely to come into force anytime soon.

But then if Manchester United claim another Champions League title come May I won’t be complaining.

Beckham must decide to follow his head or his heart

David Beckham has a difficult decision to make. Stay in AC Milan and continue to play at the highest level or stay true to his word and return to LA Galaxy. For some it may sound like an easy choice, returning to a perceived footballing backwater or staring for one of the world’s most famous clubs, the Rossineri.

When the former Manchester United and Real Madrid midfielder joined Milan at the start of the year there was no pressure, and no expectation. He was simply training with some of the best players in the world to stay fit in he MLS winter break, and to stay in Fabio Capello’s England plans. But what has happened is that Beckham has proved once again that he really is a great player, culminating in a spectacular free kick last night, and not just a walking advertisement, and so the speculation about his future hit fever pitch.

It’s a similar situation to what happened in Madrid once Becks had agreed his move to the Galaxy. Despite doubts about his commitment, and once again about his ability, Beckham battled his way back into the Real first team and ended the season as their best player. The result, the Madrid hierarchy desperately tried to backtrack and re-sign the England man after realising their mistake in letting the star leave for free.

So now back in Italy Milan are doing all they can to make the short term loan deal that brought Beckham to the San Siro into a permanent deal. Beckham is the forbidden fruit. Milan are being told they can’t have him by Galaxy but that’s going to stop them taking a bite. The loan has been a success off the pitch too (no surprise there) with shops in London running out of Beckham AC Milan shirts.

The constant flood of stories in the media speculating about Beckham’s future, will he stay or will he go, make you believe there may actually be something in it. Normally when you see some transfer gossip the first response is ‘yeah right’, but when the reports keep coming, and with Beckham unwilling to give an answer one way or the other, you come to the conclusion that a deal could be done.

But the problem for Milan, as Manchester City found when they tried to buy Kaka from them, is that just because you want something to happen in football and just because it is in the paper everyday, it doesn’t mean it actually will. LA Galaxy have invested a lot of money in Beckham, a hell of a lot. In America they kindly publish every players’ salary (because of the salary cap rules) and Beckham earns $5.5m before bonuses every year, with guaranteed bonuses taking that sum up to $6.5m. After two disappointing seasons in the MLS the Galaxy hope to build a new team in the off-season and want Beckham to lead it to glory. Galaxy sees itself as America’s Super Club but have rarely lived up to that title in recent years.

Just as Galaxy have a lot invested in Beckham, Beckham has staked much on the Galaxy. He arrived in the US promising to raise interest in the world game and to some extend he has. Attendences are up as are shirt sales, but Galaxy know that if Beckham were to leave now, as things start to get better, it could all be undone. It wouldn’t look good for the league if their new dawn ended so quickly, and it wouldn’t look for Beckham if he went back on his word and left so soon. Furthermore Beckham’s kids are happy in Los Angeles and as a strong family man would he really want to make them move schools?

A lot of this speculation will come from the directors of the Milan club as they try and engineer public support for the board. However you can’t blame Beckham for considering extending his stay when he is playing so well and wants that England appearance record. He is just 33-years-old and when you consider that Ryan Giggs is still starring for Manchester United at the age of 35 it is easy to think that he moved to the MLS too early. It also easy to undermine the quality of America’s premier professional league, which in truth is not akin to the conference as some ‘pundits’ have suggested, and the media have then latched on to, but is comparable to the Championship in quality.

One possible solution would be too extend the loan deal for another year or two. Beckham would still technically be a Galaxy player, and could even turn out for their money spinning tour matches, but would get to continue playing in Italy. Then after the two years sabbatical he could get back to transforming the game in America. However I don’t think this is really viable as Beckham has too much riding on his Galaxy gamble including, and most importantly, his reputation.

Beckham has often spoken of his enjoyment of life in American and at relishing the challenge of developing the game, there is even talk of him buying a club when his career finishes. So until he says “I want to stay in Milan and leave Galaxy”, it looks like he’ll be back in the MLS in March.

A good article on this by the good people at Four Four Two can be found here:

http://fourfourtwo.com/news/italy/24075/default.aspx

The pressure of 1st pick is too much for some

One of the unique features of the game in America is the way young players are signed up to teams through the Superdraft. Working in the same way as the more high profile drafts that stock up NFL and NBA teams, MLS clubs pick from the best players leaving college – it’s all about getting an education in the US – and the most talented kids who have signed up to the league with a sponsorship to complete their schooling. Scouts watch the players with the most potential through college and in the combine, which pits the best players in draft against each other in a series of matches.

The biggest problem with the draft system is that coaches don’t get to work with these young players before pulling them into the senior set-up. Throughout the rest of the world youngsters have to go through a series of trials where they are watched closely by coaches, not just scouts, to see how they perform within the team environment and can judge their determination, and ability to take instruction.

The second fault is the amount of pressure it places on the symbolic overall first pick, especially in a land where American Football is the biggest sport and the first overall pick in their draft is expected to be a massive star, and will earn millions of pounds. No player has been hit harder by the burden of being picked first than defensive midfielder Nik Besagno, who was drafted by Real Salt Lake with their first ever pick in their expansion season.

Besagno was only16 when he was drafted by the ridiculously named Real Salt Lake in 2005, making him the youngest opening pick since a certain Freddy Adu. With the pressure of being the next big thing, and the supposed future of the organisation, Besagno struggled in Salt Lake and, after getting “beat up pretty bad” on his first day at training, he made only a handful of appearances in three and a half years.

A loan move to USL side Seattle Sounders at the end of last season promised to be a fresh start for a player many Football Manager fans identified as having great potential. However in the real world he couldn’t even get any game time in the second tier of American pro soccer and was eventually waived by Real Salt Lake at the end of the year.

At only 19 years of age a player once heralded as a future star was cut by his team and suffered further indignity when no teams claimed him in the resulting waiver draft. He got another opportunity at Seattle, his home town, when he was invited to train with the newly formed MLS Sounders in their pre-season training camp, but was one of the first players to be struck from the roster and finds himself without a club, set adrift in the footballing wilderness.

Young striker Danny Welbeck has the potential to make it at Manchester United

A number of fantastic young players have come through the ranks in recent months, but FA rules are preventing even more following in their wake. The likes of Danny Welbeck, Jack Wilshire and Jack Collison have great futures in the game and are proof that we can produce quality players in England. However the powers that be know we can do more.

FA Techincal Director Trevor Brooking agrees with this. He tried to resign because he was not able to do his job to the maximum. The bureaucracy at the FA means he can’t spread best practices and encourage the development of our nation’s best talent.

The biggest problem affecting youth development in the UK is the rule that prevents clubs signing kids under the age of 18 if they live more than an hour’s drive away from the club’s training ground. The idea behind this is a noble one, it prevents the big clubs stealing all the best talent from the little clubs. However in practice this has resulted in the big clubs going abroad to sign young players in the same way the Premier League has done to fill out it’s first team squads. Futhermore this straightjacket rule prevents the best players from training with the best players. In a competitive environment where only the most talented and determined kids get through surely quality would be improved by getting the best of them practising together every day.

You could argue that this would then lead to exactly what the FA wants to avoid with the poorer clubs ending up with no players, but in truth this would actually lead to players leeching out equally down the leagues. If a young player doesn’t get into Club A he signs for Club B instead. An example of this can be seen at Manchester City where they have had to get the second best youngster in the area with Manchester United getting first pick. The result? Micah Richards, Joe Hart, Daniel Sturridge and Stephen Ireland get all the way into the first team.

So the FA should scrap their one hour rule – it’s not even fair anyway as coastal sides likes Sunderland and Portsmouth are geographically penalised as half of their catchment area is in the sea – and this would logically support UEFA President Michel Platini’s push for a quota system as more English players would come through at the top clubs.

There are some quality players coming through right now. The much heralded Arsenal reserves are mostly English and the current England U19 is simply fantastic. But to compete on a world stage we need more players to make it at the big clubs where they need to be at international standard to even get a look-in.

Sébastien Le Toux - the first player signed by MLS expansion new boys Sounders FC

With football being so big and the number of people that are actually any good at so small, it is no suprise that the rest of us live out our dreams from the sidelines. Football management and fantasy football games are massive – everyone has a fantasy football team although too many of these are entered into the quite frankly rubbish official Premier League game – and these diversions give us the chance to show how well we could do if we were only given the chance of running a club. We’d get them playing stylish football, we’d sign the best talent and we’d earn the respect of the media. I remember someone actually applied for the England manager’s job, on one of the numerous times it became available, quoting their Football Manager expertise as why they would perfect for the job.

Well imagine if we could actually do it for real. Wouldn’t it be fantastic to build your own team, to create a football club in your image? Obviously you couldn’t it give it a fantasy football name (Norfolk and Chance should be banned from all games!), but the idea of building a club from the ground up is certainly appealing. It’s not really possible in the UK though, and you certainly couldn’t make it competitive. All we can do here, where the game is so established, is start up a five aside team with our mates, give them a name and find a kit. Unless of course you’re a Saudi billionaire and can just buy an existing team and promise to buy Kaka.

So we have to look abroad to find somewhere we can build our football utopia. First stop is Germany where previously unheard of Hoffenheim are taken the Bundesliga by storm. In the early 90s the founder of software firm SAP Dietmar Hopp put his money behind the club and after some gradually progression, they now top Germany’s top division after spending just one season in Budesliga 2. For a club based in a small town, playing in a tiny – but attractive – stadium its an incredible achievement. A lot of their success this season is down to striker Vedad Ibesivic, a previously unheard of Bosnian, who topped the goalscoring charts with 18 goals in 17 games before injury brought a premature end to his season.

Hoffenheim is a great story, it’s like Hull in the Premier League except they’re challenging for the league, but it has taken time to get where they are. They have put together a good team and shown faith in their young players, and transformed a non league, provincial team into a national power – they’re building a new 40,000 capacity stadium so they intend to stay there. This means our search to live out our football fantasy continues, and it takes us to the land where dreams come true. We’re going to America.

In the US, where they are still trying to develop interest in the world game, despite Beckham’s best efforts to bring it to national attention, it is possible to start a football club from scratch. Professional soccer in the land of the free does not involve promotion or relegation, instead leagues grow with new owners buying expansion spots. So we can skip the need to climb the non-league football ladder and the FA pyramid and jump straight into the top level to build our new club.

The newly formed Sounders FC have done just that. With the popularity of football growing in the United States – the MLS won league of the year in America beating the juggernuats of NFL, NBA, etc – they are continually tying to expand their premier professional league. The latest team to join the league are Seattle Sounders FC and they already have asperations of competing from the word go, and target a debut season play-off place. Starting from a blank page the team behind the Seattle bid, including comedian Drew Carey and movie producer Joe Roth, get to build an intirely new club. They get to hire a coach, set up a training ground, choose a kit and sign up the players. They’ve cheated a little bit by using the NFL stadium Quest Field to host the games and are taking some of the USL (the professional league below the MLS) Sounders players to fill out their roster, but the opportunity to scout around the world and discuss plans with fans sounds fantastic. They got the first draft pick in the recent Superdraft where MLS clubs snap up the best college talent, signed USA legend Kasey Keller in goal and former Arsenal midfielder Freddie Ljungberg as their designated player.

However, this all comes at a cost as you would expect. An MLS expansion berth costs $40m and in order to get selected a bid must prove the strength of their ownership group and that there is a market for football in their city. Phillidelphia will follow Seattle into the league next year and two more teams (possibly including a Barcelona Miami team featuring a certain Thierry Henry) will join for the season after that. Another option would be to set up a USL team, where the expansion fee is much much smaller, although the interest in the league is much much smaller and team managers are left to scrap over the players who weren’t quite good enough for MLS.