World Cup Blog Competition

Here is the first in what should be a regular series of World Cup blog competitions.

The Competition: Predict new England manager Fabio Capello's starting eleven for the friendly match against Switzerland on Feb 6th, 2008.

Just post your predicted starting eleven as a comment on this thread.

The Prize: Two football shirts for any international team in any size delivered anywhere in the World.

The Deadline: 23:59 GMT February 4th, 2008

Choosing A Winner: A winner will be chosen at random from the profile names of all those who correctly guess the starting eleven at 20:15 GMT February 6th (presuming at 20:00 kick-off).

The winner will be announced on this thread of this blog, so bookmark us, subscribe to our feed , get our widget or check back regularly.

Winner Notification: When we announce the winner, we will post an email address they can contact to claim their prize.

Just to kick you all off, here's my predicted starting eleven for England vs Switzerland :

Goalkeeper: Robert Green
Defenders: Ashley Cole, Rio Ferdinand, Micah Richards, Joleon Lescott
Midfielders: David Beckham, Gareth Barry, Steven Gerrard, Ashley Young
Strikers: Gabriel Agbonlahor, Dean Ashton

Post your entries in the comments section

All These Coaches Deserve To Reach The World Cup Finals

The bigger the business we call football has become, the less we see the type of characters that made the game so enjoyable in the past.

Luckily, there are still a few eccentric and charismatic characters around - mostly, it seems, coaching teams in Africa.

It is for this reason that this World Cup blog would very much like to see both Egypt and Ghana qualify for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.

Egypt's manager Hassan Shehata once called Mido (who admittedly was playing like a slightly overweight sloth) "a donkey" and is not a man who is afraid to state his opinions on the media, fans, players...anything that takes his fancy, really.

Ghana's current coach, Claude le Roy, looks like a middle aged post-operative female-to-male transsexual (look, it's true, I just call it as I see it).

The joy of le Roy is that he spends all his time creating strange metaphors (mostly related to sex) and once described football as "a permanent orgasm".

He is another charismatic character (he once said " eloquence is the ideal G-string for people who want to hide embarrassing things about themselves.") in a game that is far from brimming over with them. For that reason, let's hope he and Ghana make it to South Africa 2010.

Of course, honourable mention must go to another coach (this time not managing an African nation) : the legendary Otto Rehhagel, manager of Greece.

Any coach who simultaneously holds the Bundesliga record for the most victories (387), most draws (205), most losses (228), the most goals scored (1473) and the most goals conceded (1142) truly deserves a place at the World Cup finals.

World Cup Football News For Your Blog or Profile

If you have a MySpace, a Xanga or a Facebook profile or would like to add World Cup news and views to your blog, then our widgets can help you do that.

In fact, whatever social network or personal homepage you use (Bebo, PageFlakes, Orkut, Freewebs...the list goes on), you can get a World Cup widget for your site.

You'll get all the latest World Cup posts right there on your blog. Can't be bad.

For smaller widgets (you can customise colours, sizes and more), go to http://www.widgetbox.com/widget/2010-world-cup to get our World Cup widgets.

Opera Users : Opera users can click this link to get an Opera widget.

Got More Space To Spare ? : You can get a larger, fancier looking widget (250x300 pixels minimum) from SpringWidgets.