I'M AN ANORAK GET ME OUT OF HERE!

There's always a strange feeling the morning after the final whistle in the World Cup. It's not like the Olympics where the events finish at different times and then you get the big closing ceremony, all the previous 63 matches of the FIFA 2006 World Cup were for one ultimate prize.

I remember a fortnight or so after the 1990 World Cup (hardly a vintage by anybody's standards) one of my neighbours saying how much he was missing the evening games from Italy and there is definitely a void in the television schedules now.

I was interested to see the television viewing figures that have been released, not the FIFA ones which are based on some strange estimate system of how many people could have been reached (that's where the 1.1 billion viewers comes from) but the trusted by the industry figures. England came 17th in the table which showed the % of the population who actually watched the nation's games - 17th! This is our national winter sport, from the third week of August to the second week of May we concentrate on football and yet only 17% of the great viewing public watched England's games. Compare this to the Netherlands (44.7%), Argentina (43.2%) or the eventual winners Italy (30.1%).

Interestingly 47% of the audience for the Sweden v England game were women.

When it comes to showing an interest in football as a global sport we didn't do much better with 8.3% watching every game, compared with 16.4% in Croatia and 16.2% in Uruguay, and they didn't even qualify!

FIFA claimed that the 2002 Final was watched by 1.1 billion people, that's one in five people on earth, the real figure was closer to 250 million which is pretty impressive anyway. The discrepancy arises because FIFA counts everybody who has watched any of the Final, be it live, highlights, online, included in news programmes etc.

So that's it until 2008 - Chinese Olympics, European Championships, Tour De France coming to London.