The uncomplicated Lancastrian has become the summer’s defining figure. His ebullient cricket has typified England’s aggressive storming of the crumbling ramparts of Australian supremacy. His consoling of Brett Lee, at the conclusion of the Edgbaston Test, symbolised the enduring appeal of cricket’s sporting traditions. At a time when Chelsea’s corporate arrogance, Rio Ferdinand’s greed and the Premiership’s predictability have prompted a disenchantment with football, this combination of English adventure and good manners has given cricket, and Flintoff, a lustre unmatched since the retirement of I T Botham.Oh dear, three paragraphs in and already Ian Botham has muscled his way into another Flintoff piece.The comparisons, invidious though they may be, are unavoidable. As a player he didn’t surprise me because he was already one I liked very much. He’s a fantastic character and a leader in the group.”He has a lot of discipline, he only picks up yellow cards once every three months and opponents respect him. But when you work with him and see the person he is and what a professional he is you also see his ambition to become a better player.

He’s good defensively, he’s good in possession and he has the vision for a pass.”He understands the game Tactically he’s intelligent. He scores goals from midfield and you always feel he can score. He’s not a super-specialist on set-plays but now and again he scores from a free-kick.” Lampard, who has 51 goals for the Premiership champions, signed from West Ham for £11m in 2001 but since Mourinho got to know him a year ago he has been just as impressed by his personality.”He is a better person than I imagined he would be because when I arrived here I didn’t know him. Imagine Liverpool losing at Betis in their first game or we don’t beat Anderlecht in our first game at home. This would be a big problem for us.”As for Liverpool, we could draw both games with them – why not? But also I would take two victories.”At the European draw, Frank Lampard missed out on being voted the best midfielder in the Champions’ League last season but, nappy-changing permitting, the England international will play his 150th consecutive league game today for the Blues, against Spurs.Mourinho praised the man who became a father for the first time on Monday and then scored two goals in Chelsea’s midweek win against West Brom “Frank is a crucial player for us,” he said “You get everything from him. It is not a new thing for them.”Some players in the small teams, when they listen to the Champions’ League music or see a 60,000 stadium, they shake all over It’s difficult for them.

But Betis have Ricardo Oliveira and Joaquin and Anderlecht have Bart Goor, Per Zetterberg and Emile Mpenza, so our group is very difficult For Liverpool also. We also have Anderlecht who are in the competition every year. I know them.” Chelsea were also drawn on Thursday with Belgium’s most famous club, Anderlecht, and Real Betis, who will be making their debut in the Champions’ League .But Mourinho wanted to make it clear the Spaniards were no mugs and could prove an awkward obstacle on the path to the knockout phase He said: “Betis are the best team in the fourth seeds There are no doubts about it We don’t have FC Thun or Rosenborg or Artmedia Bratislava We have Betis They knocked out Monaco who reached the final last year. “I don’t have to travel, I’m in England, I don’t have to analyse the team. A week after exclaiming how he had metaphorically “killed” Ricardo Carvalho in the dressing-room, Jose Mourinho was far more measured last night in his assessment of Chelsea’s chances in the Champions’ League. Considering a group that has seen his side pitched in with Liverpool, Anderlecht and Real Betis, the Portuguese declared his satisfaction at being paired with the Merseysiders but his feelings of unease at facing the other teams in Group G.
Despite losing out to Liverpool at the semi-final stage last season, by one disputed goal over the two legs, the Chelsea manager confessed that he was still happy to face the European Cup holders so soon.”I prefer to play Liverpool than Real Madrid or AC Milan,” he said. Substitutes not used: Mandrikin (gk), Samodin.Referee: R Temmink (Netherlands)..

He said once:I got my political ideals during the war and I remember being on a convoy in 1943, going on the Atlantic run to Canada. When you were a stoker down in the bowels of the ship, you heard the depth charges going off.Back in Belfast, he became involved in the small Labour groupings which offered ineffectual opposition to the Unionist governments which ran Northern Ireland via the Stormont parliament His labels included Irish Labour and Republican Labour. A brilliant ward politician, he built a backstreet powerbase which won him a seat on Belfast Corporation and, in 1962, at Stormont. There his earthy, humorous rhetoric and natural flair for publicity often saw him running rings round staid Unionist opponents.But his complaints of systematic anti-Catholic discrimination by the Unionist regime fell on deaf ears, since Westminster politicians adamantly refused to take an active interest in Belfast matters. Fitt played a major part in changing this state of affairs, paving the way by winning the West Belfast Westminster seat in 1966 by beating a Unionist to become the first nationalist in the Commons for many years.He ensured his victory by distinctly questionable means which included personation, the ancient and dishonourable practice of vote-stealing, which was then practically universal. Comparing notes in later years, I told him of my Unionist grandmother’s parlour, which on election day was filled with hats and coats to give personators a change of clothing for their numerous return visits to the polls.

Fitt cheerfully explained the finer points of such dodgy democracy, not just admitting the practice but bragging about how he had matched and defeated the Unionists at their own game. He recalled that even the illicit had a protocol:You didn’t take the other side’s votes You only did your ownside. It was for somebody who was maybe sick, people who would be voting for you anyway.Once at Westminster, he was highly effective, linking up with Labour MPs such as Kevin McNamara and Paul Rose to build a case against Stormont. The journalist Mary Holland recalled he had “bullied and cajoled and persuaded me that there was intolerable discrimination against the Catholic minority”. But, despite years of pressure, the Commons turned a Nelsonian blind eye, clinging doggedly to the convention that all Northern Ireland matters were the business of Stormont and not Westminster.Things changed utterly, however, in October 1968 when a Londonderry civil rights protest was broken up by police, with many marchers being batoned. Fitt was among those injured, an official report later concluding that he had been struck “wholly without justification or excuse”. He later recounted:A sergeant grabbed me and pulled my coat down over my shoulders to prevent me raising my arms Two other policemen held me as I was batoned on the head.

I could feel the blood coursing down my neck and on to my shirt.As I fell to my knees I was roughly grabbed and thrown into a police van. At the police station I was shown into a room with a filthy wash basin and told to clean up but I was not interested in that. I wanted the outside world to see the blood which was still flowing strongly down my face.The images of Fitt’s bloody head and shirt flashed around the world and at a stroke rewrote the basic grammar of Northern Ireland politics. The convention disappeared immediately, he became a nationally known figure and Northern Ireland became an important issue.In the years that followed much of the civil rights movement crystallised into the SDLP with Fitt, as its sole Westminster MP, becoming its natural leader. He stayed leader for close to a decade, but during all that time there was a sense that he would have been happier as a one-man-band. The former Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald described him as “essentially an independent who was never comfortable in the role of party leader”.

If you’re really stuck, I’ll allow up to five performers from sports other than football, such as Andre Agassi, Boris Becker, Colin Cowdrey, or even, because it’s so nice and topical, Freddie Flintoff.Yes, quiz season is back, sporadically in this column and weekly in various pubs I know. Taking Didier Drogba as your candidate for D – rather than Damien Duff, Didier Deschamps, Derek Dougan or Davie Dodds – how many letters can you think of which begin both the first and second names of a footballer, past or present? The person who gets nearest to 26 names, on the assumption that Q and especially X could be a struggle, will get a bottle of something alcoholic, but I promise it won’t be Double Diamond. At the usual pre-match selection meeting one week, the first XI captain – a droll Ulsterman called Tom Kirkpatrick – told the gathering that Barry would be unavailable for Wednesday’s crunch game against the University of Dundee because he had injured his knee. “And what’s worse,” added Tom, with mock solemnity, “it’s his goalscoring knee.”
I can imagine Jose Mourinho saying the same thing in a press conference about Didier Drogba, who, having missed every opportunity with his feet, finally steered the ball past Jens Lehmann with his patella.Yet it is not Drogba’s goalscoring knee on which I wish to dwell this week, but his name.

Barry was a forward, who rarely scored goals from more than a yard out, and rarely with a conventional part of his anatomy. The defender is out for six weeks and will miss the second part of his battle with club-mate Ryan Giggs on the left side of the Wales midfield.Eriksson could choose Neville’s brother Phil as a direct replacement although he may go for the Liverpool centre-back Jamie Carragher. While neither player are right-backs for their club sides, there will be a case for Phil Neville marking Giggs, a player he knows well from his time at Manchester United.. The name Barry Kinghorn will mean little to most of you, but it was Barry, a dour Scot with whom I occasionally played football at St Andrews University 20-odd years ago, who lurched into my mind during last Sunday’s Chelsea v Arsenal match. Should Parker convince the England manager that he is worthy of inclusion in the squad, and if Gerrard fails to overcome his injury, then it will be the Newcastle man or Owen Hargreaves in competition for the defensive midfield place.
Apart from the doubts over Gerrard’s fitness – he withdrew from Liverpool’s squad for last night’s European Super Cup match against CSKA Moscow but still hopes to be fit for the match in Cardiff – there is only the question of who will play instead of the injured Gary Neville at right-back. The England manager will be on Tyneside tomorrow afternoon to monitor the progress of Parker, 24, as he contemplates facing Wales on 3 September without Steven Gerrard who is battling against a calf problem. He’s as happy having a beer and a chat with his mates as he is playing Test cricket against Australia.”Sometimes the concept of sportsmen as role models is not so daft..

Scott Parker will be hoping to save the skin of his new Newcastle manager Graeme Souness when he faces Manchester United at St James’ Park tomorrow, but the midfielder will also know that an impressive display might just advance his England prospects with Sven Goran Eriksson in the stands. “He has the qualities that players respond to and he leads by example. He also really thinks about the game and what he is doing out there. It will be interesting to see where his future takes him in the game, but I guess he wouldn’t make too many noises about it because he is such a humble guy.”I just love him He’s so good for cricket, and he is a great man. Marsh, who knows better than most the requirements, having kept wicket to the great Australian team of Dennis Lillee and the Chappell brothers, then swapped sides to develop young English talent, believes Flintoff is a future captain.”He would make a great captain because the players would want to follow him,” Marsh said.

He was also dragged reluctantly into celebritydom but, though he does television advertising, has managed to retain much of his privacy, popularity and sanity.It is to be hoped Flintoff does too English cricket needs him if it is to build on this revival. The current burst of publicity is analogous to that enjoyed by the oval-ball code around England’s World Cup triumph. Wilkinson was the Flintoff of that team, a homespun matchwinner. For Flintoff being able to get a table at The Ivy will be no compensation.This, in the celebrity-fixated culture of England is probably unavoidable What is within Flintoff’s control is the extent of his fame. He has Rachael and Holly’s names tattooed on his arms, but he is no David Beckham He does not seek the spotlight. Last week he went to France because, he explained: “It was difficult to get away from the Ashes in Manchester, but in France they are not bothered.”The exemplar is Jonny Wilkinson Cricket is not the new football, it is the new rugby union.

I am confident that we have a good case but it is always unpredictable.”The school has said the expulsion is for Rhys’s “behaviour and attitudes”, and the teenager admits he has accumulated about 400 “chits” at school for minor offences.Mr Gray dismisses suggestions that his battle is a rich man’s whim. A dead shark doesn’t deal with death; it is dead! Well, actually, when I do some stuff I really do deal with some things.” The things his autobiographical novel, My Fault, deal with (mental and sexual abuse, alcoholism, stamping on cats…) are not pleasant But his work is at least, he says, true. The question of what is art is “very, very simple”, he reckons. “Would the person do it if he wasn’t being paid? This would eradicate all of contemporary art! You don’t pickle sharks in your shed for 20 years because you believe in it So basically it’s sausages But not as useful. Because you can’t eat it.”Perhaps surprisingly, the outspoken Childish has won a number of fans among those more famous and influential than himself Not that he’s in awe of them. “Blur? Well, Graham used to come to our gigs and stage dive off a one-foot stage on to his face .. Mudhoney genuinely liked us and helped us.

But they were one of the few people who are not totally involved in their career and had no problem with the fact that I didn’t like their music at all. Kylie rang me up and asked me if she could use one of my poetry book titles for an album title, and she was very polite and very nice. And she used to send me things now and then so I used to send her some things. I think that was when she was interested in being a bit more rough I think she got over me. She realised that she doesn’t want any rough at all, ha ha!” Not that he’s more impressed by rough. “The bloke from the Libertines, the wayward one, he’s never managed to meet me,” he adds. “They say, ‘This brick deals with …’ and it doesn’t deal with anything.

They experience themselves through others.”Billy Childish’s work, on the other hand, is all about experiencing himself. “I’ve ended up leaving every time I’ve been supposed to meet him. Channel 4 must be “well funded to be able to snap at the heels of the BBC”, he said, and consideration given to keeping ITV’s public service dimension, when analogue switch-off makes it commercially unviable.. And so basically that probably means I wouldn’t be able to sell any pictures.” He shrugs, but not regretfully “It’s not the art that’s important, it’s who you are. Because I don’t believe we’re here for no reason, I’m not a nihilist.”I think I believe him, even before he tells me, as a parting by-the-way, about his father and brother, the father and brother he wrote about in My Fault, the ones he says almost drove him to murder “My brother is a painter,” he explains “My brother is the opposite of me. He went to grammar school, the Slade and the Royal College and he got all of his qualifications.

“Conceptual art is continually discussed in terms of dealing with something,” he growls. Hundreds of paintings and woodcuts show him scowling and scarred, in blacks and reds and smudges of ink. He actually has a very nice face: turned down at the eyes, with the Kitchener moustache and a gold bottom tooth and a kind smile But the sentiments the paintings express are not kind. You’ll get someone who’ll argue with you that Damien Hirst is good because they can’t like something that isn’t. They can’t say, ‘I like it and it’s a load of rubbish’ because apparently it is them People don’t see themselves as people. The first will be the resurrection of an old cabaret club in Piccadilly, which will throw back to the 1940s with house bands, dinner and dancing.This will be followed by the renovation of the ballroom in Bloomsbury Square’s magnificent Victoria House, originally used for entertaining the clients of the insurance company that owned the building, which is being turned into a music venue. He is also opening a site in Paris, in a similar style to the Jazz Caf?and plans to take music festivals to Eastern Europe.His business plans do not, however, involve ever running a stock market-listed company again “I was never really cut out for that role.

I love going out every night and being in the West End too much,” he says, adding that he rolls home at 4am most nights of the week “I was never much good in the boardroom. Having one shareholder – me – makes life much easier because you don’t have to worry that you are spending other people’s money.”He floated the Mean Fiddler business in 2000 but an over-expansion into restaurants and bars led to losses. The business was only just recovering when Mr Power decided to sell out to a subsidiary of Clear Channel in April for £38m. His stake in the business was once worth more than £150m at the height of the dot boom.. Rentokil Initial said yesterday it would not open its books to Sir Gerry Robinson until his bid vehicle comes forward with an offer. Raphoe, the bidding vehicle spearheaded by Sir Gerry for the purpose of making a move on Rentokil, has told the company it “is not ready to put forward a proposal”, Rentokil said in a statement yesterday.
The news sent shares in Rentokil down more than 3 per cent during the day, wiping off some of the £271m the company gained earlier this week when Raphoe revealed it was interested in making an offer.

Shares soared 11 per cent to 166.75p on Monday, when Sir Gerry announced he had created a team to look at Rentokil. Yesterday, shares closed 2.3 per cent down at 158.5p.A spokesman for Raphoe said its position towards Rentokil had not changed since earlier in the week when it announced that it wanted to approach the board with a view to a possible bid.Rentokil, which on Thursday reported what it called “horrible” interim results, said it was not possible for the company to hand over commercial information at this stage. “It would not be appropriate to pass Raphoe information that is not available to other public investors unless and until a proposal is received that the board considers would be in the best interests of shareholders,” a statement from the company said.Rentokil shares have fallen about two-thirds from their highs of 1999. The business has been struggling and its declining performance culminated in its long-standing chief executive, Sir Clive Thompson, being ousted by a boardroom coup.Since then, the new chief executive, Doug Flynn, who came on board in April, has been conducting a strategic review of the business and on Thursday announced that he planned to keep the company largely intact.

This is a nightmare that our politicians, not just our scientists, should be losing sleep over.. Paul Irwing and Richard Lynn, distinguished academics at the Universities of Manchester and Ulster, have recently published research that has stirred up controversy by suggesting that men bear on average significantly superior intelligence, or general cognitive ability, than women. As an animal health issue, it would pose a major problem, but with the right sort of biosecurity measures, it would not be insurmountable.What we should really be concerned about are the human health consequences of avian flu. The discovery yesterday of a gull in Finland thought to be infected with a non-deadly strain of bird flu suggests this could well be only a matter of time.This, of course, would be a major threat to free-range poultry kept outside, where they can easily come into contact with wild birds. The H5N1 strain has probably infected millions of birds, both domestic poultry and wild species.

It has also been found to infect pigs – the classic “mixing vessels” where different flu viruses swap genetic material to generate even deadlier strains. The more animals the virus infects, the greater the chances of it mutating into a form that could be easily transmitted between people.This is why we should be taking avian flu seriously. The appearance of the virus in Central Asia and Siberia shows how readily it can be spread by migrating birds. Obviously, migrating birds infected with a deadly form of avian flu are not going to fly very far.

But some species may be relatively immune to the virus, and so able to carry it over great distances.In Britain, no species of migratory waterfowl that winter here come from the areas of Russia currently affected by avian flu. A virus that kills 50 per cent would be far, far worse.
The world now is far more densely populated and urbanised than it was in 1918. Global travel makes it possible for flu viruses to spread rapidly from one part of the globe to another. These viruses are also able to mutate into more infectious forms.

Cole conceded that the team was “getting nervous” towards the end of the match as Wales pushed forward. “We didn’t control it as well in the last 15 minutes but they were throwing everything at us then.”
His team-mate Steven Gerrard admitted that one of the problems had been that he was “asked to play in three different positions” – moving from the centre to the right and then left. The England players admitted that there had been some confusion over the system employed by their coach, Sven Goran Eriksson.

“I felt it worked well at times but it’s not like we’re going to get it right first time”, said Joe Cole, who scored England’s goal. Substitutes not used: Ingham (gk), Brunt, Sproule, Murdock.Azerbaijan (4-4-2): Kramarenko; Amirbekov, Tagizade (Nabiev, 84), Muzika, Imamaliyev; M Gurbanov (Ponomaryov, 65), Sadygov, Guliyev, Hajivev; Kerimov, Aliyev (Shukurov, 74). Substitutes not used: Hasanzade (gk), Guliev, A Gurbanov, Melikov.Referee: D Stanisic (Serbia & Montenegro).Booked: Azerbaijan Guliyev, Aliyev, Amirbekov, Sadygov.Attendance: 14,000.. Stuart Elliott opened the scoring in the 60th minute with a superb 20-yard free-kick and then Warren Feeney stepped off the bench to add a second. And Sanchez has a relaxed attitude towards Wednesday’s encounter.

“We are not expected to win as we are 100-odd places below them in the Fifa rankings,” he said.Goals: Elliott (60) 1-0; Feeney pen (85) 2-0.Northern Ireland (4-4-2): Taylor; Baird, Hughes, Craigan, Capaldi; Gillespie, Johnson, Davis, Elliott (Robinson, 89); Healy (Jones, 79), Quinn (Feeney, 72). The Luton striker grabbed the ball off Elliott to score from the spot.
The result came without the midfielders Jeff Whitley and Phil Mulryne, who were banished from the squad for breaking a curfew. But that could have worked in the team’s favour, according to the manager, Lawrie Sanchez.”Sometimes the chaos works for a team in that it concentrates your mind on what the job is,” he said. Germany (who qualify as hosts) Argentina Iran Japan Saudi Arabia South Korea Ukraine United States Brazil.

The Northern Ireland goalkeeper Maik Taylor says his side will go into Wednesday’s match against England with renewed confidence after ending a four-year run without a competitive win by beating Azerbaijan “We have nothing to fear against England,” he said. Victory over Cameroon would have put them into the finals but Alioum Saidou won the tie for Cameroon in the 85th minute. Ivory Coast must now defeat Sudan and hope Cameroon lose to Egypt. Angola and Togo can also secure World Cup debuts next month and deny Nigeria and Senegal in the process. Morocco must win in Tunisia to overtake them and claim the region’s fifth place.

Some described a loud bang while the plane was still in flight, followed by a ball of fire.
“It happened very fast, no one even had time to panic,” said Rohadi Kamsah Sitepu, 35, from his hospital bed. The Grey Area, made in 2002, is a good place to start, and shows Dawson has a talent for creating great-looking, atmospheric modern ballet. He twists classical shapes mostly out of recognition but makes good use of the dancers’ technical prowess, emphasising 180-degree angles or the gorgeous curve of a long leg and powerful pointe. It is all beautifully lit, in soft streaks of light and dim shadows, highlighting the dancers’ flesh in an almost fetishistic fashion.
The opening sees three dancers make a string of molten moves in parallel lines across the stage, shifting their hips so that their bodies bend from concave to convex. In some countries, crews get trained according to the law, but trained to a minimum standard. All modern airplanes are safe, but they may not be if they don’t get maintained properly and the crews don’t get trained properly. It’s about who operates it, and what their safety standards are.

What do you think ? Probably, that the driver made a mistake.”It’s the same with an aircraft. But the chances of crashing when you fly with airlines coming from outside of western Europe, North America and Australasia are an order of magnitude greater.”This is because countries which are more modern, politically and economically, have the luxury of a safety culture, which applies to everything, such as road safety, and not just aviation.”Mr Learmount went on: “If you pass a road crash do you stop and look at what make of car it is? No. There are massively different standards of safety achieved by airlines in different parts of the world. African airlines have always been the least safe to fly with: there are exceptions, such as South African Airways, and Ethiopian Airlines, interestingly enough, is another, but on the whole they have a pretty awful record.

Latin America had been getting better than it used to be recently, but perhaps it’s reverting to type, I don’t know, and Indonesia has always been poor.”The advice is and always has been, fly with the majors, because they have a superb safety record. He says modern aircraft are far safer than their predecessors, incorporating key new features such as the enhanced ground proximity warning system, which has eliminated what was the major cause of air passenger death – controlled flight into the ground (a plane hitting a mountain the captain did not know was there.)Instead, Mr Learmount points to a very different and perhaps uncomfortable conclusion: culture.Specifically, he says that the less-developed countries have a much less strong safety culture, in every way, than the developed West, and that when this consideration is applied to air transport, it means that flying on airlines other than the “majors” – the big names such as British Airways, United, Lufthansa or Air France – is simply not as safe.”Statistics tell us that it’s safe to fly, but they also tell us who it’s safe to fly with,” he says.”If you take these recent crashes, apart from the Air France one, where everybody got out safely, as they were meant to do, ask yourself if you have heard of the airlines concerned.”(They are, respectively, Turinter from Tunisia, Helios from Cyprus, West Caribbean from Colombia, TANS from Peru and Mandala from Indonesia.)”The answer is that you haven’t This is not surprising, this is fact. “It’s a very, very long time since we’ve had this many, even in one year, and it’s a really freakish time,” he said.But ask him if commercial flight is becoming less safe, as passenger numbers continue to boom and more and more planes take to the skies, and he denies it robustly. And it had aviation experts wondering at the biggest series of air disasters for several years.Six major crashes in as many weeks: is this just random coincidence, or something more disturbing? In disasters from Greece to Peru, from Sicily to Venzuela, and now in Indonesia, nearly 500 people have lost their lives; and but for a remarkable escape another 300 would have died when their Air France airbus hit the deck at Toronto’s Pearson airport on 2 August, at the start of the current spate of incidents.David Learmount, operations and safety editor of the magazine Flight International, is one of the world’s leading experts on air safety, and he agrees that the current round of accidents is remarkable.

I can’t believe it.”When the Mandala Airlines plane crashed in overcast weather 500 metres from the airport at Medan in north Sumatra, shoving aside cars and motorcycles before ploughing into a row of houses in a fireball, it killed at least 147 people, many of them on the ground. I struggled to take off my seat belt and then ran through a hole in the fuselage, jumping over charred bodies scattered all over the road.”Mr Sitepu, who escaped with minor bruises to his legs, said” “It’s a miracle I survived. “There was an explosion outside the plane followed by huge flames inside the cabin Then we crashed. Survivors said the Jakarta-bound plane started shaking when it reached an altitude of about 300ft before tilting sharply and smashing to the ground. All in all, a successful launch for Sputnik.To 10 September (020-7837 7816). In was the sixth major air crash in as many weeks: the Boeing 737 shook violently seconds after take-off, veered to the left and slammed on to a busy street in Indonesia’s third-largest city yesterday, bursting into flames.

Still cashing in (and why not?) on their back-catalogue of classics from their most heady period, 1987 and 1993.
Tonight they’re at Ally Pally. The palace is an unusual venue for a rock band (it feels like you’re in an aircraft hangar), and the acoustics are rather unforgiving. A year on from the massive hype, they are still around, however, still churning out the same material, in pretty much the same order. The gushing wave of critical enthusiasm is gradually dying down since this apparently unreformable band (relations between Black and Deal turned notoriously sour, and in the end Black was rumoured to have informed the band by fax that they were splitting up) reformed and played the Brixton Academy to hysterically favourable reviews last year. I must have soaked up and wallowed in the unadulterated nostalgia. I must have bowed down before this celebrated Boston quartet – the singer Francis Black (born Charles Thompson), the bassist Kim Deal, the guitarist Joey Santiago and the drummer David Lovering Except it didn’t quite work out that way.

“Outside there’s a box car waiting/ outside the family stew/ out by the fire breathing/ outside we wait ’til face turns blue.” These words of agreeable drivel, from arguably the Pixies’ most accessible song, “Here Comes Your Man”, swirled around my head all night, in my sleep So, I must have had a decent time. When she lost weight immediately after giving birth to her first son Brooklyn, Mrs Beckham said it was her natural metabolism, but with her third birth she admitted following a strict diet.Elizabeth Hurley lost 4st in the six months after the birth of her son Damian, reportedly by living on one meal a day.Anna Friel, the actress, promised the producers of her next film that she would do nude scenes within three months of having her baby.The trend has led to a quarter of new mothers wanting to lose their excess weight within six weeks of giving birth, according to an ICM poll.Gillian Fletcher, a former president of the National Childbirth Trust, said: “New mothers are already under huge pressure with all the changes that having a baby brings, and I think it is sad that women feel they have to lose weight so quickly.”. A third said that celebrities influenced how they thought they should look.Despite this, more than half of the women thought celebrity mothers who lost weight rapidly after giving birth were setting an irresponsible example.Mrs Beckham disappeared from the public eye after having her third son, Cruz, earlier this year but reappeared five weeks later – and 2st lighter. But they also blamed their partners for putting pressure on them.
A survey of 1,000 women found that 47 per cent felt pressured into “having it all”, even when pregnant, by maintaining their career, looks and social lives.Eight out of 10 said it was important to keep their looks and figure while carrying a baby, and 46 per cent admitted to worrying about weight gain in pregnancy.More than half – 57 per cent – felt pressure from their partners to look good. Women blamed celebrity mothers such as Victoria Beckham, Elizabeth Hurley and Anna Friel for setting an unhealthy trend for rapid post-baby weight loss.

New mothers say they are under too much pressure to lose weight immediately after having a baby and even to stay slim while pregnant. Vivienne Nathanson, head of science at the BMA, said: “If the Government is aware of the hazards [of passive smoking], how can it defend only a partial ban on smoking in public places – exposing workers to toxic chemicals just because they are unlucky enough to work in pubs and bars not selling food?”The British Heart Foundation said: “Protecting only 60 per cent of pub workers from the dangers of second-hand smoke because they happen to serve burgers with their beer is a senseless proposal that must be stubbed out without delay.”The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) has urged the Health Secretary, Patricia Hewitt, to bring in a full ban on smoking in enclosed public places. The RCN said this would save 30 people a day from the fatal effects of passive smoking.. Exemptions would leave many workers at most risk from the damage caused by second-hand smoke. This research should be the final evidence the Government needs to drop the exemptions.”The British Medical Association accused ministers of double standards for launching a campaign today warning of the dangers of passive smoking.

In the heat of a Millennium Stadium giddy with excitement at out-singing the visitors, the most obvious lesson to be learned was that 4-5-1 works well for England’s captain.Perhaps not for Wayne Rooney, and even in the case of Shaun Wright-Phillips and Frank Lampard, two players whose club Chelsea have pioneered the formation but for whom the system did not draw the very best performances. It did, at the very least however, place Beckham right back at the heart of the national team and once there he established a relevance that has escaped him of late when he has been dispatched to occupy a place on the right that has seemed increasingly more isolated.His capacity for reinvention in other areas of his life has, we already know, been boundless. By the end of the afternoon, England’s new holding midfielder had redressed the balance.

The fundamental questions about the 4-5-1 formation – whether it will survive the return of Michael Owen, whether another bold new system will take its place by next summer -can only be answered when Sven Goran Eriksson knows exactly which players he has at his disposal next June. Saturday was the day that the captain’s role changed forever, and the longevity of his international career might just depend on how well he adapts.

If the seventh World Cup qualifier of England’s campaign proves to be the starting point for a fresh new departure in Beckham’s life as an international footballer then it started inauspiciously enough. Quite who among the blazers of the Welsh Football Association booked Goldie Lookin’ Chain, an act best described as irreverent, as the pre-match entertainment remains a mystery but their unflattering remark about Beckham’s wife, Victoria, was symbolic of the nonsense he has long had to endure. Kicked by John Hartson and insulted by the only hip-hop act in history to come out of Newport. It was tempting to think that, short of borrowing the flanker Ryan Jones to mark him for the afternoon, the nation of Wales threw everything they could at David Beckham and still failed to prevent one of his best England performances in recent memory. England and Poland have so dominated the section that both, under the European qualification system, should go through to next summer’s finals automatically as group winner and one of the two best group runner’s-up.. That’s why it’s important that when we win the ball we try to keep it so we can come up and support him.”* England seem certain to clinch a place in the World Cup finals before next month’s tie with Poland, a fixture which had been looming as the decisive one in Group Six. Frank Lampard is always good but he’s not in top form, I don’t think, for us or Chelsea There are reasons for that He is slow in coming to his best.