For anyone who watched England's very dispiriting World Cup campaign recently but imagined that better times were just around the corner, this afternoon on EuroSport they were given a very rude awakening from their rank denial. England were frustrated as they went down 1-0 to the Netherlands in their second game in Group A of the UEFA Under-19 Championship in France. 
Steven Berghuis' sixth-minute header settled the match in favour of the young Oranj. Noel Blake's England side could, perhaps, have felt somewhat unlucky after Aston Villa's Nathan Delfouneso saw a second-half strike disallowed when he was erroneously adjudged to have handled the ball. But, in truth the England side, featuring the cream of teenage talent in this country, were a woeful second best to a team with far more skill and class about them. England battled hard and could clearly run all day but, frequently, they resorted to a depressing long ball game - hoofing the ball down field towards the strikers and bypassing midfield completely. The Dutch keeper, Jeroen Zoet, was lucky to see the ball rebound wide of the post when he charged out of his area and cleared against Frank Nouble but the win was no more than the Netherlands deserved, with their flying wide man, Jerson Cabral, particularly impressive for Wim van Zvam's team as England's backline looked shaky throughout. In the day's other game in the group, Antoine Griezmann and substitute Alexandre Lacazette scored twice each as the hosts, France, hammered Austria 5-0 to all but secure their qualification for the semi-finals.
Two French international footballers have been charged with having sex with an under-age prostitute. Franck Ribery, twenty seven, and Karim Benzema, twenty two, who have both been linked with moves to Premier League clubs, could face up to three years in jail if the case goes to trial. The indictments are the first stage of an investigation launched by magistrates intent on cracking down on an alleged celebrity vice-ring in Paris. Detectives bugged the Zaman Cafe, a pricey nightclub just off the Champs Elysees, which they suspected of giving clients access to minors working as call girls. Four people - including the club's owner, a waiter and a man suspected of pimping girls to celebrities and sportsmen - have been placed under investigation and could also face trial.
Ribery, whose twenty two-year-old brother has also been charged in the sting, arrived at the Palace of Justice in Paris in handcuffs but was freed without preconditions after the hearing. His lawyer Sophie Bottai expressed surprise at the charge, saying: 'The only thing that's new since the last time he was questioned is that the World Cup is over and he played badly. There's not a single element of physical proof,' she added. 'This woman told them she was of age, was all made up, dressed up, appeared very switched on.' The Bayern Munich winger has never denied paying for sex with the young woman at the centre of the scandal, Zahia Dehar, who is now eighteen years and four months old. Adult prostitution is in itself legal in France, but pimping, solicitation and running organised vice networks are banned. The country's general age of consent is fifteen years, but in the case of prostitution a young person remains legally a minor until he or she reaches eighteen.
The International Football Association Board says that Champions League games will have two extra assistant referees next year. The system was tried in last season's Europa League and will be retained there and used in Europe's elite club competition for the next two years. The refereeing experiment will allow FIFA to take a decision on its' long-term viability in 2012.
Goal-line technology will be discussed at the IFAB's next meeting in October. Other tournaments in Asia and South America will also try out the extra officials system. FIFA president Sepp Blatter has long been a staunch opponent of using technology to help referees make decisions, but the outcry over high-profile mistakes such as Frank Lampard's disallowed goal in England's World Cup loss to Germany seem to have caused a softening of the official stance. FIFA general secretary Jerome Valcke told BBC Sport the Lampard incident, where the ball hit the underside of the bar and clearly came down over the line, before bouncing away and no goal being given, had been 'a bad day' for tournament organisers. He also said the 2010 World Cup would be the last 'under the current refereeing system,' without giving further specific details.
Silvio Berlusconi contrived to put Milan's new coach Massimiliano Allegri in the shade by publicly demanding his team play with more than one striker this coming season. In an extraordinary news conference on the first day of pre-season training, the Italian prime minister and Milan owner fielded every question and left Allegri and several team members to sit in silence. Berlusconi told the new coach what tactics he should use after falling out with last season's coach, Leonardo, as Milan again ended the campaign without a trophy. 'We don't want to see just one forward up front. To win you have to score. To have chances you've got to have forwards close to the goal,' Berlusconi said. 'I appreciated Leonardo a lot but I disagreed with him in how he fielded the team. Ronaldinho must play on the shoulder of the strikers even if he has a tendency to drift left.'
Ronaldinho has been linked in the media with a move away from the club but Berlusconi was adamant the playmaker was staying. 'He is the number one attraction at Milan,' he said, 'Ronaldinho does not want to leave. I'm sure he is happy to stay.' The futures of Gennaro Gattuso and Klaas Jan Huntelaar look less certain. 'I would be happy for Gattuso to stay but we are not against people saying they want to leave,' Berlusconi said. 'We can't exclude [the sale of Huntelaar] even if we are convinced of his qualities as a main striker.' The seventy three-year-old, who arrived by helicopter, welcomed the new signings Mario Yepes, Marco Amelia and Sokratis Papastathopoulos but was lukewarm over the prospect of luring the Barcelona striker Zlatan Ibrahimovic back to Italian football. 'I don't know how well he'd fit into the Milan dressing room,' he said of the former Internazionale player.
So, you thought Steve Bruce knew what he was doing when it came to central defenders, did you? Big Titus Bramble is, apparently, set to undergo a medical at Sunderland as he looks to seal a move from Wigan. The two clubs are reported to have agreed a fee in the region of one million pounds and, although personal terms are yet to be finalised, talks are said to be ongoing. If Bramble passes his medical he could fly out to join the rest of manager Bruce's squad in Portugal where they are currently in pre-season training. The twenty nine-year-old former Ipswich Town and Newcastle United player missed the end of last season with a foot injury. He had initially been expected to be sidelined for fourteen weeks but said recently that he was ahead of schedule in his race to be fit for the start of the season on 14 August. Bramble began his career with home-town club Ipswich, making his first-team debut in 1998 and helping them to a fifth-place finish in the Premier League and a spot in the UEFA Cup in 2001. The following season, however, Town were relegated from the top flight and Bramble, who had twelve England Under-21 caps, moved to Newcastle. The wisdom of buying the centre half from a team which had just gone down whilst conceding sixty four goals wasn't questioned when Sir Bobby Robson paid six million pounds for Bramble in July 2002. The player went on to make over one hundred appearances for the Magpies. And also, make about a hundred defensive errors - roughly one-per-match - almost all of which seemed to result in goals against his club. Some of them were laughably memorable ... unless you had the misfortune to be a supporter of the club in question. In which case, they're merely painful. At the end of the 2003–04 season, readers of the football e-mail newsletter The Fiver voted Bramble - nicknamed by some of his more unkind critics as Titus Shambles - as 'the worst player of the year in the English Premiership.' One reader wrote: 'Titus's occasional flash of brilliance is heavily outweighed by the total inability to think before attempting what inevitably turns into a hashed clearance, a mistimed tackle, an own goal or a penalty for the opposition.' To be fair, most Toonies really wanted Titus to succeed and, for a couple of years gave him far more support than he deserved. And, in odd flashes, he did seem to have the makings of a decent enough defender.
Ultimately, though, after a while that one-calamitous-mistake-per-game ratio looked like sticking with him for the rest of his career and many wrote the lad off as a tryer but a bit of a plank. Built like a brick outhouse but with the touch of a hippo and the grace of a giraffe-on-ice, Bramble was subsequently highly critical of Newcastle's supporters - the people who, remember, had paid his, highly inflated, wages for the previous five years - following his transfer to Wigan in 2007. 'Maybe I should have moved on from Newcastle to get first-team football earlier,' he said. 'The Newcastle fans aren't as good as everybody says.' Nice. The feeling was, trust me, entirely mutual. So, it'll be interesting to see what sort of reception Big Titus gets from the Gallowgate on 31 October if he returns to St James with, of all people, the Mackems. Football supporters do tend to have rather long memories when it comes to being insulted by former players. Particularly those with - genuinely - as little reason for feel hard-done-by as yer man Titus Bramble.
Steven Berghuis' sixth-minute header settled the match in favour of the young Oranj. Noel Blake's England side could, perhaps, have felt somewhat unlucky after Aston Villa's Nathan Delfouneso saw a second-half strike disallowed when he was erroneously adjudged to have handled the ball. But, in truth the England side, featuring the cream of teenage talent in this country, were a woeful second best to a team with far more skill and class about them. England battled hard and could clearly run all day but, frequently, they resorted to a depressing long ball game - hoofing the ball down field towards the strikers and bypassing midfield completely. The Dutch keeper, Jeroen Zoet, was lucky to see the ball rebound wide of the post when he charged out of his area and cleared against Frank Nouble but the win was no more than the Netherlands deserved, with their flying wide man, Jerson Cabral, particularly impressive for Wim van Zvam's team as England's backline looked shaky throughout. In the day's other game in the group, Antoine Griezmann and substitute Alexandre Lacazette scored twice each as the hosts, France, hammered Austria 5-0 to all but secure their qualification for the semi-finals.Two French international footballers have been charged with having sex with an under-age prostitute. Franck Ribery, twenty seven, and Karim Benzema, twenty two, who have both been linked with moves to Premier League clubs, could face up to three years in jail if the case goes to trial. The indictments are the first stage of an investigation launched by magistrates intent on cracking down on an alleged celebrity vice-ring in Paris. Detectives bugged the Zaman Cafe, a pricey nightclub just off the Champs Elysees, which they suspected of giving clients access to minors working as call girls. Four people - including the club's owner, a waiter and a man suspected of pimping girls to celebrities and sportsmen - have been placed under investigation and could also face trial.
Ribery, whose twenty two-year-old brother has also been charged in the sting, arrived at the Palace of Justice in Paris in handcuffs but was freed without preconditions after the hearing. His lawyer Sophie Bottai expressed surprise at the charge, saying: 'The only thing that's new since the last time he was questioned is that the World Cup is over and he played badly. There's not a single element of physical proof,' she added. 'This woman told them she was of age, was all made up, dressed up, appeared very switched on.' The Bayern Munich winger has never denied paying for sex with the young woman at the centre of the scandal, Zahia Dehar, who is now eighteen years and four months old. Adult prostitution is in itself legal in France, but pimping, solicitation and running organised vice networks are banned. The country's general age of consent is fifteen years, but in the case of prostitution a young person remains legally a minor until he or she reaches eighteen.The International Football Association Board says that Champions League games will have two extra assistant referees next year. The system was tried in last season's Europa League and will be retained there and used in Europe's elite club competition for the next two years. The refereeing experiment will allow FIFA to take a decision on its' long-term viability in 2012.
Goal-line technology will be discussed at the IFAB's next meeting in October. Other tournaments in Asia and South America will also try out the extra officials system. FIFA president Sepp Blatter has long been a staunch opponent of using technology to help referees make decisions, but the outcry over high-profile mistakes such as Frank Lampard's disallowed goal in England's World Cup loss to Germany seem to have caused a softening of the official stance. FIFA general secretary Jerome Valcke told BBC Sport the Lampard incident, where the ball hit the underside of the bar and clearly came down over the line, before bouncing away and no goal being given, had been 'a bad day' for tournament organisers. He also said the 2010 World Cup would be the last 'under the current refereeing system,' without giving further specific details.Silvio Berlusconi contrived to put Milan's new coach Massimiliano Allegri in the shade by publicly demanding his team play with more than one striker this coming season. In an extraordinary news conference on the first day of pre-season training, the Italian prime minister and Milan owner fielded every question and left Allegri and several team members to sit in silence. Berlusconi told the new coach what tactics he should use after falling out with last season's coach, Leonardo, as Milan again ended the campaign without a trophy. 'We don't want to see just one forward up front. To win you have to score. To have chances you've got to have forwards close to the goal,' Berlusconi said. 'I appreciated Leonardo a lot but I disagreed with him in how he fielded the team. Ronaldinho must play on the shoulder of the strikers even if he has a tendency to drift left.'
Ronaldinho has been linked in the media with a move away from the club but Berlusconi was adamant the playmaker was staying. 'He is the number one attraction at Milan,' he said, 'Ronaldinho does not want to leave. I'm sure he is happy to stay.' The futures of Gennaro Gattuso and Klaas Jan Huntelaar look less certain. 'I would be happy for Gattuso to stay but we are not against people saying they want to leave,' Berlusconi said. 'We can't exclude [the sale of Huntelaar] even if we are convinced of his qualities as a main striker.' The seventy three-year-old, who arrived by helicopter, welcomed the new signings Mario Yepes, Marco Amelia and Sokratis Papastathopoulos but was lukewarm over the prospect of luring the Barcelona striker Zlatan Ibrahimovic back to Italian football. 'I don't know how well he'd fit into the Milan dressing room,' he said of the former Internazionale player.So, you thought Steve Bruce knew what he was doing when it came to central defenders, did you? Big Titus Bramble is, apparently, set to undergo a medical at Sunderland as he looks to seal a move from Wigan. The two clubs are reported to have agreed a fee in the region of one million pounds and, although personal terms are yet to be finalised, talks are said to be ongoing. If Bramble passes his medical he could fly out to join the rest of manager Bruce's squad in Portugal where they are currently in pre-season training. The twenty nine-year-old former Ipswich Town and Newcastle United player missed the end of last season with a foot injury. He had initially been expected to be sidelined for fourteen weeks but said recently that he was ahead of schedule in his race to be fit for the start of the season on 14 August. Bramble began his career with home-town club Ipswich, making his first-team debut in 1998 and helping them to a fifth-place finish in the Premier League and a spot in the UEFA Cup in 2001. The following season, however, Town were relegated from the top flight and Bramble, who had twelve England Under-21 caps, moved to Newcastle. The wisdom of buying the centre half from a team which had just gone down whilst conceding sixty four goals wasn't questioned when Sir Bobby Robson paid six million pounds for Bramble in July 2002. The player went on to make over one hundred appearances for the Magpies. And also, make about a hundred defensive errors - roughly one-per-match - almost all of which seemed to result in goals against his club. Some of them were laughably memorable ... unless you had the misfortune to be a supporter of the club in question. In which case, they're merely painful. At the end of the 2003–04 season, readers of the football e-mail newsletter The Fiver voted Bramble - nicknamed by some of his more unkind critics as Titus Shambles - as 'the worst player of the year in the English Premiership.' One reader wrote: 'Titus's occasional flash of brilliance is heavily outweighed by the total inability to think before attempting what inevitably turns into a hashed clearance, a mistimed tackle, an own goal or a penalty for the opposition.' To be fair, most Toonies really wanted Titus to succeed and, for a couple of years gave him far more support than he deserved. And, in odd flashes, he did seem to have the makings of a decent enough defender.
Ultimately, though, after a while that one-calamitous-mistake-per-game ratio looked like sticking with him for the rest of his career and many wrote the lad off as a tryer but a bit of a plank. Built like a brick outhouse but with the touch of a hippo and the grace of a giraffe-on-ice, Bramble was subsequently highly critical of Newcastle's supporters - the people who, remember, had paid his, highly inflated, wages for the previous five years - following his transfer to Wigan in 2007. 'Maybe I should have moved on from Newcastle to get first-team football earlier,' he said. 'The Newcastle fans aren't as good as everybody says.' Nice. The feeling was, trust me, entirely mutual. So, it'll be interesting to see what sort of reception Big Titus gets from the Gallowgate on 31 October if he returns to St James with, of all people, the Mackems. Football supporters do tend to have rather long memories when it comes to being insulted by former players. Particularly those with - genuinely - as little reason for feel hard-done-by as yer man Titus Bramble. 
