World Cup Diary

The field gets weaker without France, Argentina

By Gavin Hamilton, World Soccer Editor

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So it's adieu to France and adios to Argentina. The two teams that were most fancied to reach the Final are already on their way home. Shocks and surprises are the lifeblood of any tournament. But there can be no denying that the 2002 World Cup is worse off for the absence of the top teams from Europe and South America respectively.

The French exit is easier to explain than that of the Argentines. To lose one of your two best players could be considered unfortunate; to lose both is a disaster. Without a fit Zinedine Zidane, France lacked the guile and cunning to unlock tight midfield spaces. But without the injured Robert Pires, the French lacked any semblance of urgency in attack. It was also a question of belief.

Nobody expected the French to fail so spectacularly, least of all the French themselves

Roger Lemerre will inevitably attract criticism for his selections. To leave players of the caliber of Lyon midfielder Eric Carriere at home, while persisting with the selection of elder statesmen Frank Leboeuf and Emmanuel Petit, was a mistake from which he will not recover. It is now a question of when, not if, Lemerre will fall on his sword. The race is now on to find a successor, even though French federation president Claude Simonet admits: "We don't have a hot new coach waiting in a drawer."

Speculation will focus on a select few. Arsene Wenger is the preferred choice, but he recently committed himself publicly to Arsenal. PSG's Luis Fernandez is another, but he has as many enemies as friends in the federation. The smart euros will be on Jean Tigana, whose future at Fulham is uncertain following the arrival of Franco Baresi as technical director.

The eyes and ears of planet earth may be trained on the World Cup, but that has not stopped some people in the game from using the tournament to bury news, in a style that would make Jo Moore green with envy.

With the nation's football correspondents in Japan, Manchester United may have been hoping that nobody would notice their appointment of Carlos Queiroz to their backroom staff. It could prove to be a hugely significant move. Queiroz, though he has not coached a major club since Benfica in the early 1990s, is a hugely respected figure in coaching circles.

His youth development work in Portugal has clearly not gone unnoticed at Old Trafford. Queiroz is known for his preference for attacking football and for promoting youth.

Could we be looking at Alex Ferguson's successor?

Red is definitely the color of the World Cup in Korea. The whole country has adopted red as the official color of the national team, Everywhere you go, you cannot escape the calls to paint the town red. Today's Korean Times even gave over its main editorial comment page to a piece which extolled the virtues of the color red.

Yet red is a strange choice for South Korea, given the strong associations of red with the communist north.

The Koreans only need a point from their last group game against Portugal to reach the promised land of the second round. But given the way in which the Portuguese polished off the Poles, I fear that there may be a few red eyes in Korea tomorrow night

Quote of the day.

"It's not the end of the team, but something was broken in the machine."
--France captain Marcel Desailly starts the inquest.

 

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