I learnt during the WC that Sven Goran Erikkson is an intelligent man. Who else, some business leaders aside, would do such a useless job and still have the nous to negotiate be paid a vast sum for a year after he quit the job? Mind you, after watching McClaren’s attempts, I yearn for SGE back!

1) Most commentators can’t pronounce Gelsenkirchen.

2) ITV should not let the BBC have exclusive coverage of the next major football tournament if they can’t do a better job. I see that even Gabby Logan has jumped ship now.

3) England doesn’t have a football team, just a collection of inflated salaries and egos, and Gerrard and Lampard can’t play together.

I take your point regarding Gelsenkirchen – if I had been presented with the anagram before the 2006 World Cup, I would have had no idea and would have resorted to Google etc.

But this, in my opinon, is offset by the fact that the World Cup made Gelsenkirchen known over its duration – I remember quite a few commentators giving snippets of information on the city, stadium etc in the course of the matches played there and particularly so during the buld up to the England/Portugal game. I think it is reasonable to assume that, even if they did not know the correct spelling, the name remains reasonably memorable to most people (and quite a few ‘non-football’ people watched the game) given the short time lapse since the WC.

Let’s agree to disagree on this one!

GAUGE wasn’t difficult to get but only from the definition and checking letters. The word play played no part in me getting it as GAGE is an obsolete word which I deduced from the grid entry. Had the grid entry been GAGE and the word play a homophone of GAUGE I would have had less of a quibble as that way easy word play is aiding a more difficult definition.

Maybe I’m alone on this one!

Have to disagree about GELSENKIRCHEN – it came almost immediately and I would have smiled at the cleverness of the clue if the memory of the England/Portugal game hadn’t made this keen England fan cry endlessly!