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LONDON -- The ice age is coming, the sun is zooming in. Engines stop running and the wheat is growing thin. ... 

It's long past midnight in London, and I can't find Stephen A. Smith anywhere on the telly. No I, Max or World Series of Poker coverage on any channel. Not even a single story about the U.S. basketball team, who I'll assume has lost to Laos and Papua New Guinea, since losing to Italy.

But there is plenty of football news in Old Blighty, and by football I mean soccer. Lots and lots of soccer. The entire country is svetting over Sven-gate, and for the 240 million of you in the U.S. who have not followed this sordid tale, Sven is Sven-Goran Eriksson, the manager of the English national team, and the keeper of hope and optimism for a country neurotic about football.

It turns out he and his boss -- former Football Association (FA) chief executive Mark Palios -- had an affair with the same woman, an FA secretary named Faria Alam. Then, as is often the case, the cover-up became worse than the act. The Association initially publicly denied Eriksson's affair, a denial the FA later had to retract. Then Palios resigned last week after his affair with Alam came to light. To make matters worse, accusations also surfaced that the FA communications director concocted a plan to leak information about Eriksson's affair to a tabloid in exchange for the paper keeping quiet about Palios' dalliance with Alam. (His resignation was accepted by the FA on Thursday.)

Mix a three-pronged sex scandal with the growing resentment about Eriksson's failure to win either the 2002 World Cup or the '04 Euro Championships, and you have the Queen Mother of tabloid stories.

While in London there is no greater pleasure -- at least for yours truly -- than to fill my cart with the city's endless wave of daily newspapers. And when the English football coach has his knickers in a pinch, oh, get ready for some media fun. Let's start with the cheekiest of them all: The Sun. First, the headline: Thigh noon: Sven shot his bolt but he'll dodge the bullet. Then the lede, by a writer named Andrew Dillon: "It's thigh noon for Sven Goran Eriksson as the FA big guns meet at lunchtime today. And England's boss is confident he will escape the bullet at the inquiry into his fling with Faria Alam."

The Sun also reported that salt ("The deadly white powder") is responsible for 35,000 deaths in the UK every year. No mention of pepper, who must have been unavailable for comment.

Sven-gate is the talk of all the papers: Got him! FA have the evidence to sack Sven but will they have the nerve? (Daily Express); Sven stays: But FA powerbrokers still out to get him (Daily Mail); In the line of Faria: Will Sven and Co. survive today's FA sex scandal trial? (Daily Mirror); Stay of execution for Eriksson (Daily Telegraph); Eriksson likely to escape with rap on the knuckles (The Times).

Indeed, the FA cleared Eriksson yesterday of any wrongdoing and said he had "no case to answer" over how his affair was initially denied. The secretary resigned on Thursday, but in true Darva Conger fashion, Alam has reportedly agreed to sell her story for upward of 500,000 pounds. Now comes the fun part: England will play a friendly game against the Ukraine on Wed., Aug. 18, at St. James Park in Newcastle, England. Circus maximus, anyone?

Naturally, the TV guys are also all over this, including channel five's John Barnes' Football Night, which I watched for the first time. What's really shocking about this show, at least for an American sports viewer, is the lack of screaming. No person named Stat Boy scoring arguments. No rants from the English versions of Mike Lupica and Skip Bayless. Just three well-dressed commentators (Barnes is a former Liverpool star) sitting around and modestly discussing Eriksson, Paul Scholes' retirement from the national team and Patrick Vieira's impending eviction from Arsenal. Their calm and reasoned discussion made one thing very clear: These guys would never make it in America.

The Bristol Chill

On an ESPN conference call this week the nostalgia was so thick among the 40 and 50-somethings who are promoting the network's "Old School Week" that I thought I had stumbled onto the set of The Big Chill. Five SportsCenter alums (Gayle Gardner, George Grande, Greg Gumbel, Craig Kilborn, and Charley Steiner) are returning to Bristol, Conn., to co-host SportsCenter with ESPN's current anchors. ESPN "Old School" will debut on Sunday at 11 p.m., with the team of Kilborn and Dan Patrick and will continue through Thursday. Additional partnerships planned include: Steiner and Bob Ley (Aug. 9), Gardner and Stuart Scott (Aug. 10), Gumbel and Chris Berman (Aug. 11), and Grande and Berman (Aug. 12).

ESPN has had some lame ideas in recent history -- Alanis Morissette jamming on SportsCenter immediately comes to mind -- but this is an inspired move. For the same reason SI's "Where Are They Now?" issue is popular, sports fans hold a special place in their collective hearts for the anchors they watched during their formative viewing years. Kilborn and Gumbel are now major players at CBS. Grande, who hosted the first-ever SportsCenter on Sept. 7, '79, and Steiner currently broadcast the Reds and Yankees, respectively.

Gardner's appearance on the call proved to be the most interesting. A pioneer in sports broadcasting, she worked at ESPN from '83 to '87 before moving to NBC Sports for six years. She later worked on the Food Network before writing a screenplay. Gardner revealed she had been out of television for the past couple of years following an automobile accident and four subsequent operations involving internal surgery. "I've had to sit around for two-and-half years, in not great shape," she said. "But I'm fine now. I really had a whole bunch of medical complications that made my life crazy."

Gardner said she would like to get back into television, perhaps even in sports. "I had a long television career," she said. "I have four Emmys. I would like to get back and work again -- that was my intent three years ago but unfortunately that got waylaid."

Gumbel said he's been back at ESPN only once since he left in Oct. '86, for the MSG Network. Is he surprised that ESPN morphed into the dominant global brand? "It was hard to see it in '86 because the place was being run by total idiots," he said, laughing. "At one point, the powers-that-be cut the 11 p.m. SportsCenter to 15 minutes."

ESPN executive vice president of programming and production Mark Shapiro said the five alums who will appear were the only ones asked by the network. He discussed the absences of Keith Olbermann, perhaps the most famous SportsCenter anchor. "You can't look back at the history of ESPN and the growth of SportsCenter and not think about Keith Olbermann," said Shapiro. "Very knowledgeable. Extremely talented. ... But as a result of the history of repeated criticism, we didn't want to bring him into the workplace. The damage he could cause in one day in our newsroom could put us into damage control for two years."

Don't Miss

Three programs you'll be talking about around the cooler come next week:

August 7, 4 p.m., FOX, Cubs at Giants

Greg Maddux goes for his 300th career win against Barry Bonds and his Giants crew. In what should make Skip Carey and Ted Turner happy, Fox will air the Braves versus Diamondbacks to 14 percent of the country at the same time.

August 8,  2 p.m., NBC, The Brickyard 400

NBC says it will deploy 80 cameras to cover the Brickyard 400 including a new "No Man's Land Cam," a robotic camera in the area between pit road and the track on the start-finish line. And we thought "No Man's Land" was where NBC was after they decided to stop broadcasting the NFL.

August 8, 2 p.m.,  ABC, U.S. vs. Turkey

An aptly named opponent for a team shaping up to be a turkey. The U.S. men's Olympic basketball team travels to the Abdi Ipekci Arena in Istanbul to face a squad led by NBA players Hedo Turkoglu and Mehmet Okur. Anyone who has ever watched Midnight Express knows this won't be easy for the U.S.