England may well have won their last two qualifying matches but we need to improve big time before we can contemplate a team to emulate 1966.

Come on, be honest with yourself, did we play world class football on Wednesday night in Albania? The sort of stuff that will cause the French, Argentineans, Brazilians or even Romanians to have sleepless nights before facing us.

You might think I'm being a bit negative after our national team came back from a potential banana skin still standing. But how many times have we seen false dawns?

When England win, everyone goes over the top and we get ourselves into a false sense of security.

I believe Sven Goran-Eriksson has already performed wonders. I am convinced that had we gone to Albania with Kevin Keegan in charge (or Howard Wilkinson, God forbid) we might have slipped up.

It was a professional performance. The team definitely looked like they knew what they were doing and were clearly focussed. With the striking talent at our disposal, it was always going to be a question of time before we scored.

The best we can hope for in such a short time is to qualify through the play-offs and get through to the knockout stages in Japan. There's every chance we can do well. England are on paper one of the top eight teams in the world - but Eriksson is going to need a fair bit of time before we can become world beaters.

I was amused to read Saints chairman Rupert Lowe's moans in the wake of Glenn Hoddle's departure to Spurs.

Lowe complains about the underhanded way his club lost their manager, but what goes around comes around.

They treated former boss David Jones disgracefully. Jones was found to have done nothing wrong, yet they ditched him. That was after Lowe insisted Hoddle was appointed until Jones' court case was over.

I read a great column in January imagining how great it would be if Hoddle walked out on Southampton as soon as a top London job became available.

It's ironic and wonderful that a few months later it came true.

England's cricketers need to start taking the one-day game more seriously.

Not wishing to take anything away from our Test exploits, our whitewash against Sri Lanka was a joke.

We were shown up as one of the worst one-day teams in the world. I am already concerned about our prospects for the 2003 World Cup.

It's about time we drafted in a different team for the one-dayers. Australia have mastered the game at both Test and one-day level by adopting that kind of policy.

They draft in the likes of Michael Bevan and Ian Harvey for the limited over games.

Surely we should be looking at bringing in Worcestershire's Vikram Solanki. A good one-day specialist.

We need to do something because we're a laughing stock.