Hammerings aplenty and spam for dinner

Oh what a beautiful morning, England and the US win by three goals apiece. Firstly, on behalf of England, may I apologize most insincerely for West Ham season-ticket holder Russell Brand (Forgetting Sarah Marshall) offending American sensibilities at the MTV Video Music Awards...Get in there, Rus! And at risk of another consignment of tea being dumped in Boston Harbor, did you perchance note that England smashed Croatia 4-1 in Zagreb?

Too rarely can the descendants of the inventors of the Beautiful Game gloat and chances are it's going to be another decade before we can again. Hat-trick 'hero Theo' Walcott eclipsed Wayne Rooney for the first of what I think will be many times, and the difference lies between his ears. There will always be born soccer geniuses like Diego Maradona but an above average brain can turn average players into good ones.

Off the record, Sven-Goran Eriksson blamed English players' inferior intelligence for the Three Lions stalling at the quarter-final stage of tournaments, while the FA has been ambivalent towards adopting the Ajax TIPS criteria for evaluating players – based on their Technique, Intelligence, Personality and Speed. England’s trophy-less 42 years is partly because it prefers to judge players on SPAM – Sprinting, Punting, Aggression and Muscle. I was going to insert Monty Python’s song here, but instead chose a clip neatly illustrating the SPAM-TIPS chasm.

*I had always thought I could turn to South American soccer for a fix of silky skill, but having slumbered through Ecuador’s error-strewn 0-0 vs. Uruguay and endured 45 minutes of an inept Colombia crashing 0-4 in Chile, I went gladly to bed with some of my supposed soccer truths demolished.

*Let's hope Jonathan Spector catches the eye of new West Ham coach Gianfranco Zola. The Sardinian pocket battleship was one of the best players of the 1990s and I was privileged to watch him in the flesh many times for Parma and Chelsea. Forever in Roberto Baggio's shadow however, Zola, who learnt his trade from Maradona at Napoli, never enjoyed the quality time in an azzurro shirt which he merited. His World Cup finals career lasted all of 12 minutes, when impetuous Mexican referee Arturo Brizio Carter harshly handed him a straight red 12 minutes after he had come on during Italy's second-round clash against Nigeria at Foxboro at USA '94.

Good luck to Zola at Upton Park, but what sort of shortlist was that with two Italians and a Serie A star? Director of Football Gianluca Nani may be Italian himself and Italy might be World Cup holders, but surely there are talented coaches to be found in other countries as well.

*Still in Italy, Catania became the fourth team to have its fans banned from a road game this season, after Fiorentina, Milan and Napoli, whose supporters are banned from all away matches for 2008/'09. But while the clubs plead impotence, away bans will count for nothing if the ultràs are still getting in free to home games with their bellicose paraphenalia. Just what is wrong with Italy's police? League boss Antonio Matarrese has just revealed a groundbreaking initiative to deal with the peninsula's soccer violence...prison cells in the stadium! Roma & Lazio already had those in Gladiator.

* Sergei Rebrov's shocking advice to Roman Pavlyuchenko (see Greg's post below) is sadly not an isolated case in the year A.D. 2008. Neanderthal Croatian fans, such as those shown here, again made monkey noises at England's black players, who formed the majority of their starting eleven, in Zagreb last night. Spanish fans did the same to England in Madrid in 2004, for which FIFA fined the Spanish FA a paltry $80,000 - hardly enough to stop it reoccurring. UEFA thrust their 'Unite Against Racism' campaign down our throats at EURO 2008 - so let's see them put their money where their mouth is now.

- Sean O'Conor