Rating:

Other

It's safe to assume that publishers Simon & Schuster had expected England to experience a substantially less catastrophic World Cup when they commissioned BBC presenter, and former England striker, Gary Lineker to provide a diary of events from South Africa.

For the months leading up the tournament, his present tense observations about the form of the players and Fabio Capello's selection dilemmas seem a little unnecessary. The discussion of Wayne Rooney's world-beating ability, for example, is just frustrating with the benefit of hindsight, and it's hard to imagine that any England fan would want to bring back memories of that pre-tournament optimism.

The coverage of the tournament itself is more interesting, given that the events of the World Cup are of lasting importance in the football world, and Lineker's own appearances at the 1986 and 1990 tournaments allow for some inside knowledge, even if there's little evidence of such knowledge of this year's event.

His own experience of Bobby Robson's ability to change things around as England recovered from a slow start in 1990, for example, makes for interesting reading as he complains - a little too extensively, perhaps - about Capello's tactics. Lineker highlights the problems of 4-4-2 before the tournament is underway and grows more and more vocal as England lose the midfield battle in catastrophic fashion.

It's the more anecdotal elements that make it worth reading - the revelation that a current English manager, working as a scout for Robson, dismissed Cameroon out of hand ahead of their quarter-final meeting at Italia '90; that Paul Gascoigne drove his van around a roundabout with a member of staff clinging for life on the roof; that he believes Maradona's spectacular goal against England in 1986 is the best of all time because of the substandard quality of the pitch.

The quality of the analysis is also decent enough on the whole, although it could hardly be considered in-depth, particularly in regard to the 31 other nations in South Africa.

Lineker, to his credit, appears never to have been swept up in the talk that England were among the favourites for the competition, but the inescapable problem here is that this is a book providing England fans with a reminder of a tournament that would be much more happily forgotten.