Shock: Building site resembles a building site

Fabio Capello will fly out to South Africa this week to cast his eye over England’s base for the World Cup finals. The papers are revelling in the fact that the base resembles a building site. Building sites do tend to resemble building sites when they are being built, still it makes good copy for Oliver Kay in the Times.

The disconcerting sight of diggers, breeze blocks and bone-dry pitches awaits Fabio Capello when he arrives for an inspection of England’s planned World Cup base today, only 108 days before the tournament in South Africa begins.

Capello, having flown overnight to Johannesburg, is due to travel with FA officials to the Royal Bafokeng Sports Campus near Rustenburg this afternoon to approve formally the site as England’s base for the tournament. But the £20 million hotel and training complex — which, while five-star, is markedly less ostentatious than the venue selected in Baden-Baden by Sven-Göran Eriksson for the 2006 World Cup in Germany — remains a long way from completion.

The FA, having sent a party to Rustenburg in advance of Capello’s arrival, played down concerns last night about the progress made. Officials maintain that the England manager has been kept informed about every stage of the operation and is aware of what to expect. His priority today will be to assess the condition of the pitches; Capello said, after his last inspection in December, that they were poor enough to force him to consider alternative venues.

The expectation is that Capello will give Royal Bafokeng the thumbs-up, but the first impressions of British journalists who were shown around the complex yesterday — billed as “a world-class high-altitude sports training destination” — were that the Royal Marang Hotel still looks a building site. With the pitches scorched by the late-summer sun and the on-site medical centre not built, there is a lot of work to do on a project that was originally scheduled to be finished by November. It is now due for completion next month.

Golf will go on without Woods
The Times’ chief football commentator Patrick Barclay has dipped his toe into the world of golf. Tiger Woods is such a huge draw that he can make an appearance in Barclay’s column. The scare stories of golfing Armageddon because of Woods’ absence have been doing the rounds for a while, but they reared their head again following his recent appearance to confirm he is not thinking of returning to golf, yet. Barclay, though, makes the sensible point that the sport survived long before Woods and will be around long after he packs up his clubs.

At the end of last week there was such a fuss about the ill-timed and, for all I know, illintentioned coincidence of Woods’s statement of contrition with a tournament in Tucson, Arizona, that even yours truly bewildered was dragged into a studio to mumble inexpert analysis. It was not until Friday evening that someone on Radio 4 tired of the mantra that “golf needs Tiger” and was struck by the bright idea of turning to Peter Alliss, who quietly reminded us that the game, wonderfully though Woods could play it, ought to be able to get along without him.

Not that the fraternity were in any mood to listen. I read yesterday that “the Masters without Tiger will be like Manchester United without Fergie” and that put it in a nutshell. United without “Fergie” had, in 1958, the best team in their history. A decade later they became the first English club to win the European Cup. Yet Sir Matt Busby proved replaceable, as Sir Alex Ferguson will.

Similarly, there was golf when Snead and Hogan played, and Nicklaus and Palmer. And while Woods is someone after whom the game will never be quite the same again, so was Severiano Ballesteros. Yet Woods’s drama is being treated like a death in the sense that people are exaggerating his impact (as with Michael Jackson) on not only his particular sphere but the world.

Cole in another hole
It’s not been a good week for Ashley Cole, what with the texting shenanigans and reports that Cherly is ready to file for divorce. Football is probably not top of his agenda at the moment, but the Mail are claiming that he will be hauled before the Chelsea board this week and it will be spelt out that the club will not tolerate being dragged through the gutter.

Ashley Cole will have to fight for his Chelsea future in a courtroom-style hearing with the Stamford Bridge board.

Just days after Chelsea’s players were informed by the club hierarchy that Roman Abramovich will no longer tolerate behaviour that harms the image of the club, Cole was at the centre of a fresh controversy yesterday over an alleged extramarital affair on a pre-season tour.

It was claimed he lied to a senior club official who was then implicated in a damaging cover-up designed to stop details appearing in newspapers.