Having been beaten at Old Trafford in the opening game of the season, one match preview rather prematurely declared that NUFC were sitting ‘precariously’ above the drop zone. Give us a chance! Although comfortably outclassed by Manchester United, the proper United never gave up, never capitulated, and there were signs that performances like that against weaker opposition would produce better results.

And Villa were as weak as they come – probably as poor as any side Newcastle faced in the Championship last term. After John Carew skied his early penalty, he and his teammates looked resigned to defeat.

Newcastle started sloppily, but improved to put together some good passing moves that Villa were too lacklustre to get on top of. The Toon’s lack of pace in the middle was never exposed, with Joey Barton in particular offering great energy. Carroll looked formidable, although he’ll face much stiffer tests as the season progresses.

Mike Williamson had another assured performance at centre half (and got forward to set up two of his team’s goals). At one point early in the second half he stood up to a swiftly advancing Ashley Young and dispossessed him with a solid block tackle. Simple stuff, but so refreshing after watching countless NUFC defenders over the years dive in and end up floundering on their backsides. Here’s hoping Williamson won’t be shunted out of the side when Sol ‘Bunter’ Campbell claims match fitness.

A few other first home game observations: There seemed to be a much lower take up of new home shirts than is usual at the start of a season, with the new Puma effort far outnumbered in the stands by older versions. This despite Sports Direct’s shirt ads being plastered all over the Eldon Square redevelopment…

The new SJP ‘meal deals’, including two bottles of beer and two pies for the best part of 12 English pounds, understandably failed to entice the stay-away majority back to the catering counters.

This season’s half-time ‘entertainment’ slot is even less entertaining than last season’s. Even the kids involved seemed underwhelmed and confused.

And whoever at Bid England came up with the idea of handing out promotional red and white scarves at a Newcastle match was sadly ill-informed.

Also, ‘Today’s man of the match, as voted for by the coaching staff and directors…’? We all know that NUFC have lost sponsors, but should the club be singling out their own man of the match? Handing yesterday’s award to Carroll was hardly controversial, but there could be ructions in the future.

Anyway, 6-0 eh? For those sports reporters frustrated by Chris Hughton’s lack of quotability, the emphatic result provided plenty to write about. If Hughton’s team continue to make headline, the journos will forgive him for his blandness in pressers.

Louise Taylor in the Guardian, of course, managed to find a negative angle. She decided that the 6-0 stunner was ‘overshadowed by Joey Barton’s questionable goal celebration’, which basically involved him pointing to his comedy moustache and deserves no further examination than that. The Guardian is a decent paper, but with so many good sports reporters in the North East it’s unfathomable why they can’t get someone with a bit of common sense to cover the NUFC beat.

I wrote last week that there were ten mediocre sides in the Premier League that Newcastle could beat to avoid relegation. Villa weren’t one of the ten. So this victory represented something of a bonus.

But let’s not get carried away. There will be much tougher opposition to face, and inevitable slip-ups against weaker sides. This was just one win and three points. We’ll need a lot more performances like this before the season is over, but this is certainly a time for optimism.

More NUFC stuff

The club surprised many and most last season by winning the Championship at a canter. Having been tipped to ‘do a Leeds United’, it was a remarkable turnaround after the pitiful Premier League relegation season. Chris Hughton and the players deserve lots of credit for the way they regrouped, knuckled down, and ground out results. It wasn’t pretty, but it was effective. A similar approach will be vital if Premier League survival is to be achieved. But even that might not be enough.

Perhaps even more surprising than the success found on the pitch has been the stability found off it. There have been remarkably few media circuses or PR disasters at St James’ Park of late, and the name of Newcastle United has been pretty much absent from the Sky Sports breaking news ticker. Chris Hughton has been accepted as a decent, hardworking bloke who deserves to be given a chance, and his lack of interest in generating soundbites has actually been refreshing.

There has even been a truce of sorts declared between the fans and Mike Ashley. There have been grumbles about the lack of investment in players, and Ashley and pals haven’t been spotted wearing black and white stripes in the Bigg Market for a while, but the general opinion seems to have settled down to one of ‘better the devil you know’.

Expectation among the fans remain realistic. Survival is the aim. Let’s not kid ourselves – the Championship that Newcastle bossed last season was a poor league. The lack of quality was evident in every game. Saturday’s Premier League opening day fixture in which top flight champions Chelsea thrashed second flight runners up West Brom 6-0 clearly highlighted the gulf in class between the two leagues.

The main worry is that Newcastle return to the Premier League with a squad that is, on paper, just as weak as the one that was relegated last time around. There have been few additions, and several players who thrived in the Championship might well have done so because they had ‘found their level’.

Dan Gosling looks like a good prospect, but he’s injured for the long term. James Perch rarely stood out in an average Nottingham Forest team, and Sol Campbell hardly fits NUFC’s stated transfer policy of recruiting promising youngsters.

Of the signings made last term, Leon Best failed to score in 13 appearances. (Hardly a prolific striker, Best only scored 19 times in 92 appearances for Coventry City.) Mike Williamson is untried at the top level, and Wayne Routledge has flattered to deceive at numerous other clubs.

Among the players that remain from the relegation season, the deficiencies are well known. Last season, Kevin Nolan was one of the best players in the Championship. In the previous season, he was one of the worst in the Premier League. Two years older and certainly no quicker, can the influential club captain make the grade on a return to the top flight?

Can Andy Carroll continue to provide the goals that helped propel the club into the Premier League? Which Fabricio Coloccini will turn up – the commanding powerhouse from the promotion season, or the error-prone softie from the relegation season? Can Jose Enrique avoid injury? Can Joey Barton avoid trouble? Will Jonas Gutierrez learn to cross a ball? Whither the lesser-spotted Xisco? These, and, many more questions will be answered over the next few months.

Last season, West Ham finished fourth from bottom with 34 points. In the previous season, Newcastle were relegated with the same total. So let’s take 35 points as a bare minimum for survival. That’s 9 wins and 8 draws, or a similar combination.

There are at least ten mediocre teams in the ‘best league in the world’ (West Brom, Blackpool, Wigan, Wolves, Bolton, West Ham, Stoke, Birmingham, Blackburn, Sunderland…), and they’re all likely to be beating each other on a weekly basis. The trick for Newcastle United will be to beat all of them at home and at least draw with all of them away. That’ll generate 40 points, and pretty much guarantee staying up.

In some ways, tonight’s opening fixture against Manchester United at Old Trafford represents the best possible start to the season. Whatever the result, it will leave the players, the manager, and the owner, in no doubt about the challenges that lie ahead.

As always with Newcastle United, what follows will be entirely unpredictable. Who wouldn’t be looking forward to that?

More Newcastle United posts
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If you’re in the US, the book is available from the US Kindle store. You can read more about the Rocketbelt Caper Kindle edition here.

And if you don’t have a Kindle, Amazon have launched an all-new slimmer and lighter version, which is available with Wi-Fi for £109 and with free 3G wireless and Wi-Fi for £149. Click on the banner below to take a look. Or you might just prefer to buy the paperback…

Di Caprio’s character, Cobb, assembles a team of experts and sets about the labyrinthine process of infiltrating a dream within a dream inside the mind of the mark, played by Cillian Murphy. The stakes are high. If Cobb succeeds he will be reunited with his family. If he fails, he and his team face being trapped in some perpetual dreamlike state from which they won’t be able to wake.

What follows is a complex and confusing journey into the puzzle that is the human mind, with Cobb and his team switching back and forward between reality and multiple layers of dreams, allowing director Christopher Nolan to deliver a brainbusting series of plot twists and big ticket visuals.

One of Cobb’s recruits is an architect, played by Ellen Page. She’s charged with designing the dream world in which the inception will take place, and the sequence in which Cobb introduces her to the possibilities of dreams is spectacular, with city streets and architecture bending and morphing around them on an epic scale. Later scenes in which a team member played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt tries to jolt his colleagues awake without the assistance of gravity are also amazing to watch.

I’m a big fan of Nolan, loved Memento, really enjoyed Insomnia, The Prestige and Batman Begins. I really liked The Dark Knight, too, although I thought it was a little bloated. Now, having made a billion dollars from that enterprise, he’s been given free reign to make a blockbuster apparently free from the usual studio constraints. What a rarity.

It’s incredibly refreshing to see a blockbuster that isn’t a sequel, or based on a comic book, or a theme park ride, or a toy range. It’s an original idea (extracted) from the mind of its creator, which in an ideal world would be the case for all movies, but it isn’t, so for this we should be grateful. It’s original and ambitious, and as adeptly executed as you’d expect from Nolan.

And, crucially, it makes you think. Granted, not all cinemagoers want to engage their brain when sat in front of the big screen, but this cinemagoer definitely does. Surely all movies should at least demand that the audience pays attention? Inception certainly does that, and remains in the thoughts long after the credits have rolled.

I do have a few quibbles, however. Although the dream worlds were purposely designed to facilitate the inception, they weren’t as strange as I’d have liked them to be. In dreams, people and places are never quite as you remember them. They’re odd, sometimes literally nightmarish, and I’d have liked to have seen that explored a little more. Certainly, the snow-bound world in which the climatic shoot-out takes place seemed very dull when compared to the possibilities suggested by the movie’s initial ventures into dreams. As for the shoot-outs, well it’s disappointing that a movie that promises so much ends with a fairly typical noisy blockbuster bullet fest.

So I’m not sure Inception is quite as good as some critics are claiming. Only repeat viewings will reveal whether it matches Memento. (And, for the record, I don’t think Inception is as satisfying a moviegoing experience as Toy Story 3, also out this week.) But it’s an exciting, thought-provoking, worthwhile picture that goes a long way to renewing your faith in the summer blockbuster. More films like this, please.

Toy Story 3 review: Has Pixar cracked the 3D conundrum?
Pretty Bird DVD review: Pretty Bad

I should emphasise from the start that I had no involvement or contact with anyone involved in the production of Pretty Bird, so I when I say it’s one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen I’m doing so from a (thankfully) detached position.

Pretty Bird is pretty bad. Perhaps not M Night Shyamalan bad, but still pretty woeful. But my overriding feeling after watching it was one of bafflement. Pretty Bird is just so odd, so half-hearted, so dull that it’s hard to figure out what exactly it’s trying to achieve.

The meandering first hour sees quirky entrepreneur Curt (Billy Crudup) recruit rocket propulsion expert and super-grouch Rick (Paul Giamatti and moustache) and chequebook-happy bed salesman Kenny (David Hornsby) for an unspecified scheme that is eventually revealed to involve building a rocketbelt.

What’s so special about this rocketbelt, the device around which the whole movie and any conflict within it hinges? Why are these guys so driven to build it, to fly it, to fight over it? We never find out. They build the thing without much effort, Curt and Rick fall out over nothing much, Kenny’s money runs out, and the rocketbelt disappears. And that’s pretty much it. It’s all deeply unsatisfying.

Although the leads do perfectly fine jobs, they’ve got very little to work with. The script is bland, the characters are underdeveloped, and the little conflict that exists is introduced too late. It’s pitched as a comedy, but there’s nothing remotely funny in it. It’s a really difficult movie to care about.

I was left wondering whether production problems played any part in Pretty Bird’s downfall. The best scene, Curt’s (very short) meeting with a potential investor played by Garret Dillahunt, almost seems like it’s been cut and pasted from another movie. And Curt’s romantic fling with one of Kenny’s employees, played by Kristen Wiig, shapes up interestingly, only for both the subplot and Wiig to be immediately forgotten about.

The movie labels itself as a work of fiction inspired by real events, and certainly the characters of Curt, Rick and Kenny are based on the real-life Brad, Larry and Joe. And there’s a rocketbelt in it. But comparisons with the true story pretty much end there.

I’ve no problem with the film makers playing loose with the facts. The real rocketbelt caper story is too complicated, too sprawling, maybe even too far-fetched, to be transferred to the screen without a thorough condensation of characters and events. But if you’re going to leave things out, you don’t leave out the most interesting bits, surely?

Pretty Bird makes dull work of unique and fascinating true story. It feels like a huge opportunity missed, and that’s a shame. I’m certain there’s a still great rocketbelt caper movie out there. It’s just that no one has made it yet.

Read more about The Rocketbelt Caper.

Let’s face it, few would call the tournament a classic. It started slowly and only rarely moved into high gear. The group stages were littered with draws and one-nils, and star players like Ronaldo, Messi and Rooney struggled to reproduce their club form on the world stage.

Rooney – now sporting a long beard and living in a caravan if that Nike advert is to be believed – was largely anonymous, only waking up long enough to hurl abuse at his own fans. England as a whole were poor, wanting in tactics and lacking in ability. Not good enough. Of course, England weren’t the biggest failures of the tournament – France and Italy filled those roles with aplomb.

Once England were out, the enjoyment levels were raised. But World Cup 2010 was only a feast of football in the sense that there was a lot of it.

Genuine excitement was rare, and mostly linked to controversy. The climax of the Uruguay vs Ghana match – handballs and penalty misses – was particularly thrilling. But much of the fun was linked to poor refereeing decisions, with Frank Lampard’s phantom goal a relatively minor error compared to others that changed the outcome of games.

Spain, the Netherlands and Germany were the best teams to watch throughout the tournament, and deserved their one-two-three placings. But overall there was a real lack of quality. Some may blame the much-maligned Jabulani ball, but the best goal of the tournament, Van Bronckhurst’s 30-yard rocket, proved it could be controlled.

On TV, the BBC expectedly trumped ITV, largely due to ITV’s persistence with the incessant verbal borefest that is Clive Tyldesley. In the studios, ITV’s big signing Adrian Chiles did his jokey bloke thing but was mostly outplayed and out-gagged by the boy Lineker.

The BBC thankfully ditched the incomprehensible Emmanuel Adebayor, and they produced several really good documentary pieces about South Africa, some of which didn’t include footage of an ex-pro gazing wistfully from a Robben Island window. Garth Crooks interviewing Kofi Annan about Paul the psychic octopus was, however, a lowlight.

ITV sacked Robbie Earle after match ticket ‘misappropriation’, although the real scandal was that a TV pundit had been allocated 36 tickets that could have gone to fans. But ITV’s biggest fail was cutting to an ad break on ITV HD and missing Steven Gerrard’s goal against the USA. England fans had so little to cheer that depriving them of that moment was unforgivable.

And Spain went and won it. Deserved to, overall. But it was hardly a vintage performance, in a final where fouls outnumbered chances, closing a tournament that promised much more than it delivered.

Like the vuvuzela, we’ll remember World Cup 2010, but not particularly fondly.

More World Cup stuff:
England: The World Cup Pie Chart of Blame
Football not soccer: Watching the World Cup in the USA
UFWC vs the World Cup: unofficial football heaven
How World In Motion changed English football forever

But, if the rise in the number of visitors to the UFWC website over the course of the World Cup is anything to go by, combined with a number of interview requests and press features from around the world, interest in the Unofficial Football World Championships is growing fast. If you’ve missed all this, where have you been?

If you have been following the UFWC, you will know that the Netherlands, some say Holland, are the current Unofficial Football World Champions, and have been since November 2008, since when they’ve been on a record-equalling 20-match unbeaten run. Few tipsters backed the Dutch before the World Cup began, but it’s likely that plenty of UFWC followers had their money on them. Except, unfortunately, for me (although, as a very minor form of consolation, I do have them in the Sure for Men last 16 sweepstakes competition, with a big 50 English pounds up for grabs…).

But what is the UFWC? Basically, it’s a simple method of working out football’s champions using a continuous title match system, going all the way back to the very first international game in 1872. Winners of title matches become unofficial champions, and take their title into their next match. All FIFA ‘A’ accredited matches count, including friendlies. So, when the World Cup is packed away into a box for four years, the UFWC carries on regardless.

It’s all pretty simple, and while 138 years’ worth of statistics covering 800-plus matches involving 40-plus teams might seem to to be dauntingly complicated, in fact the UFWC is all about great stories rather than the actual statistics. The continuous and open nature of the competition means that it has involved a series of unlikely champions and unsung heroes, and its lineage represents a fascinating alternative history of football.

A brief glance at the archives throws up the facts that previous champions have included Angola, Israel, Venezuela and the tiny Dutch Antilles islands, and that Scotland have won more title matches than any other nation, and are therefore ranked as the all-time UFWC champions. But, occasionally, the UFWC collides with the World Cup. That’s what has happened in South Africa this summer, and it’s all pretty interesting.

As for my involvement, I ‘created’ the UFWC around 8 years ago (in that I set up the website and wrote an article for FourFourTwo about it), although I can’t take credit for the idea of an unofficial championships. That idea was probably first properly raised by members of the Tartan Army after Scotland beat official world champions England and raised a claim to be unofficial champions.

Aside from giving groups of fans the excuse to make outlandish claims, the UFWC adds an extra dimension to football, particularly during the ‘downtime’ that falls between the World Cup and other major tournaments. The UFWC never stops, and turns otherwise boring friendly matches into must-win international cup finals.

So, when the Netherlands take on Uruguay tomorrow evening, they will be playing for even more than a place in the World Cup final. They will also be playing to retain their title as Unofficial Football World Champions. The winner of the game will take the UFWC title into the WC final. And whoever wins the final will walk away as both unofficial and official champions and holders of a unified title.

Over the course of the World Cup the UFWC has been featured in the Guardian (not once but twice), and in publications from the USA, Australia, Germany (also here, here and here), Austria, Spain, Greece, and lots of other countries that Google Translate can’t identify the language of… It’s also been fun to watch news of the UFWC spreading in various languages via Twitter (although, with hindsight, they could have been discussing something completely different beginning with the initials U, F, W and C for all I know…).

You can follow the UFWC through to the conclusion of the World Cup and beyond at www.ufwc.co.uk and on Twitter (@UFWC_Football). There is also a book, written by me, which is out of print, but is still available from ‘other sellers’ on Amazon. What the hell, while I’m shamelessly plugging stuff I might as well try to hawk some of the UFWC T-shirts which, like the book, I only get a few pennies out of, but every penny counts, right?

Anyway, that’s the UFWC for you. Enjoy the football.

Why did England crash so spectacularly out of the 2010 World Cup? There are many factors, individuals and organisations involved, but thankfully the Pie Chart of Blame simplifies a very complicated answer.

Now let me say right up front that international football is not nearly as important as club football. Come on, England jetting home is hardly your side getting knocked out of the Carling Cup is it? So the England Pie Chart of Blame may not necessarily be as seriously considered as the Newcastle United one. Anyway, that said, let’s begin the international blame game…

ITV HD. England desperately needed to get off to a good start at the World Cup, for example with Steven Gerrard scoring in the fourth minute in the opener against the USA. Sadly, if you were watching on ITV, that never happened, as the broadcaster inexplicably cut to an ad break at the crucial moment. A bafflingly bad error, even worse than the BBC’s decision to hire ultra-fast-talking naughty-phone-ringing Emmanuel Adebayor as a pundit.

The Vuvuzela. How to make football more entertaining? I know! Let’s accompany it with a constant, thoroughly annoying drone, like having a wasp stuck in each ear. The novelty plastic trumpet has made watching the games a chore, and surely must have affected the England players’ ears and thus sense of balance. Note to those intending to take vuvuzelas to English grounds next season: you will be less welcome than Michael Barrymore at a pool party.

UK Tabloids. They build ‘em up, they knock ‘em down. White van drivers (and indeed less stereotypical sections of the British public) lap it up, creating a brainless, unfounded sense of optimism, followed by a furious, self-perpetuated backlash. The truth is that a not very good England team did not very good. The media built them into something they weren’t, creating inevitable disappointment. See also that ‘do it for Bobby’ Carlsberg ad.

James Corden. I’ve somehow managed to successfully avoid hearing his World Cup single, but I do know that the only thing that could have made watching 90 minute of England failing to win any worse was following it with 30 minutes of James Corden failing to be funny.

Cheryl Cole. It’s simple – England were good when Heaton’s finest was one of the WAGs, and rubbish after she left ‘love rat Ashley’. Come on, Cheryl, couldn’t you have overlooked your husband’s indiscretions for the good of the country just this one time? (And, granted, all of the previous times?) To be fair, Wayne Bridge’s ex-missus probably had something to do with the whole sorry ‘affair’ as well.

The Germans. No need to mention the war. Or beach towels. Or even penalties. This time the ruddy Hun went and had the gall to be substantially better than us at OUR national game. And to get the benefit of a dodgy goal-line decision, just like we did when we won that World Cup we always harp on at them about. Talking of which…

FIFA. The ball was over the line! FIFA’s refusal to adopt goal-line technology robbed Frank Lampard of a pointless consolation goal. Of course, the disallowed goal was pretty much the only thing that put any fire into the England players’ bellies during the 90 minutes. If it had been allowed they might have played on with even less purpose. Which would not have been much purpose at all.

The FA. For an amateur organisation they seem to get paid an awful lot of money. Any fool knows that English football has been mismanaged for decades. The whole Capello contract saga was ridiculous, but to present any manager with a new contract on the eve of a major tournament is a ludicrous proposition, and will cost them dearly when they hand Fabio his P45.

Fabio Capello. Combats England’s lack of available talent by constructing a robust 4-5-1 system for the qualifiers. Then, for no apparent reason, goes 4-4-2 for the finals. He failed to instil confidence or ideas, made some baffling selection decisions, and refused to change things when they went wrong. Also, there were those pictures of him in his Speedos. Arrivederci Fabio.

The Players. Overpaid and under-enthusiastic. Maybe they would have played better if the FA hadn’t already arranged for their match fees to be donated to charity. The truth is that England doesn’t have as many world class players as it thinks it does. Many of those who shine in the Premier League flopped on the international stage. Several of them have done so for years. Prepare the tar and feathers for the ‘golden generation’. For three lions, read three words: ‘Not Good Enough’.

So that’s England’s World Cup over. Now we can sit back and enjoy the rest of the tournament unfettered by the spectre of disappointing underachievement. Then we’ll be back to proper home grown domestic football. And everything will be back to normal. Except for that bloke sitting next to you with a bloody vuvuzela. And there’s Frank Lampard! He was rubbish in the World Cup! BOOOOOOOOOOO!

It was on TV, in bars, on billboards, on T-shirts, and, crucially, in the minds of the public. Around ten years ago I wrote an article called The Round Ball Game, looking at how soccer had progressed in the US since the 94 World Cup and found that, despite creating the professional MLS and vastly improving its international team (one player I singled out was a 20-year-old Landon Donovan), the great American public didn’t really seem to care. In 2010 this really seems to have changed.

I started in California, where the time difference meant the World Cup constituted breakfast telly. (Every morning I woke up to the sound of vuvuzela…) The US coverage was provided by ESPN, with some key games being screened on ABC. And pretty good the coverage was, too. The team was very familiar, including commentators Martin Tyler and Ian Darke, and pundits Ruud Gullit, Roberto Martinez and, erm, Steve Mcmanaman.

There were also a few unlikely co-commentators popping up here and there (Efan Ekoku, Robbie Mustoe…), and that inimitable statistic-heavy lingo so representative of US sports seemed a bit out of place when applied to football. During the USA v England match we were informed that it was the fourth time in 17 matches that the US had allowed a goal in the first 15 minutes… or something equally banal.

But the broadcasters really did seem to be making an effort. The game was more often than not referred to as football, not ‘soccer’, and nil-nil draws were no longer ‘zero-zero ties’.

ESPN’s Sportscenter news programme regularly led with the World Cup, often ahead of the ongoing NBA finals, and the coverage also extended to network news bulletins, which provided round-ups and goals, and paid close attention to the US team’s fortunes.

The World Cup also seeped into US TV’s numerous ad breaks, with many companies using football to sell their products, and several of the ads we’ve seen over here airing over there, including Nike’s Rooney-in-a-caravan Write The Future campaign.

I was in Hollywood for the USA v England game, and ended up watching it in a bar full mostly of fellow tourists. The event was a bit of a damp squib but at least ESPN didn’t cut to an ad during Gerrard’s goal. Irate friends back home watching on ITV HD pointed out that I was the only one of them who saw the goal live, despite being an extra 5,000 miles away.

On a side note, almost every bar I went in during my trip broadcast sport in HD (and, unlike the majority of UK bars, in the proper aspect ratio). The first time I ever saw HD sport was in California a few years ago, and now it seems pretty much standard in the bars and hotels – hopefully a sign of things to come back in stoneage Blighty. ESPN also broadcast some World Cup games in 3D – something neither BBC or ITV managed over here.

Moving around California I was struck by the number of football shirts I saw – Brazilian fans with face paint and flags, Japanese fans with, well, cameras, obviously. Locals also seemed fascinated with the World Cup. Store greeters and people in elevators asked me about games. The guy behind the bulletproof window in a Santa Monica gas station said to me, wide-eyed and shaking his head in amazement, ‘Did you see Germany this morning, man? 4-0! 4-0! Incredible!’

Of course, that 4-0 win was a rarity during the early days of the competition in that it provided goals. I was worried that the general lack of excitement on offer might dampen American enthusiasm, but then I watched the NBA finals decider. It made the most lacklustre World Cup stalemate seem exciting.

By the time of England’s game against Algeria I was on the other side of the country in New York. This time I watched the match in a sports bar favoured by the US team’s Sam’s Army, and was surrounded by already inebriated American fans who took a fervent anti-England stance, and spent the build-up singing charming ditties such as ‘Freedom From Tyranny’. The US team had just come back from 2-0 down to draw 2-2, and free drinks promotions from both Magners and Miller only improved the atmosphere.

The chanting intensified during repeated showings of a jingoistic car ad depicting George Washington seeing off the pesky British army in a Dodge Challenger. I could deal with the chanting, but I must admit the whooping and high-fiving did start to grate. As it happens, the utter ineptitude of England’s performance soon wore the US fans down, and sheer boredom eventually caused them to shut up and drift away.

Outside, Times Square had been turned into a bit of a fan park, with racked seating, sponsors’ promotions, and all of the games shown on the many huge screens. The area was evacuated shortly after the England v Algeria match due to a jumper on an adjacent building. There was nothing to suggest it was a disgruntled England fan. (He didn’t jump, by the way, but it was an impressively efficient operation by the NYPD to clear thousands of people in a matter of minutes.)

Later, as we wandered through posh Greenwich Village, a group of lads in US team shirts burst out of a bar with a football and took turns kicking it at a lamppost across the street. You wouldn’t bat an eyelid at this sort of thing in the UK, but here it seemed symbolic of the general positive attitude of the Americans to the World Cup.

There’s no doubt this country is sports mad, but does it have room in its heart for ‘soccer’? If reaction to the US team’s qualification for the last 16 is anything to go by then the answer could be ‘yes’. It’ll be interesting to see how far the US can go, and how World Cup 2010 changes the country’s affection for to the greatest game of all.

Having (sensibly) waited ten years to follow-up Toy Story 2, the creators now have a neat premise – Andy is 17 and off to college, and the toys, unplayed with for years, are bagged up for the attic. Unhappy with this prospect, they instead conspire to be donated to a kiddies’ daycare centre, which they imagine to be an idyll of happy, playful children. In fact, the daycare centre turns out to be something of a nightmare, and the toys plan an escape to return to their owner.

All of the key characters return, and there are also plenty of new ones, including Lotso the less-than-cuddly bear (Ned Beatty), Curb’s Jeff Garlin as Buttercup the Unicorn, and a hilarious turn from Michael Keaton as a camp-as-Christmas Ken doll.

The end titles (worth staying for) credit around 20 people with the story, and the collaborative process seems to have paid off. It’s sharp, lean and funny, even to a cynical bugger like me.

At 103 minutes, Toy Story 3 flies by and – in a rare occurrence for for a summer blockbuster – actually leaves the audience wanting more. If it’s not quite as good as 1 or 2, that’s only because the first two movies were so fantastic. Chapter 3 is preceded by a typically great Pixar short – Night & Day – so make sure you’re in your seat early.

I’ve previously blogged that 3D is an unwelcome distraction, but in Toy Story 3 that never becomes the case. It’s used subtly and effectively – there is no pointing and poking at the screen, no throwing things at the audience. Instead it’s a subtle effect that simply adds a little depth to the image.

Unlike in screenings of Avatar, not once did I notice anyone removing their 3D glasses in order to assess the 3D effect. The movie is never less than immersive, and I, for one, forgot I was wearing the glasses. (Also, the glasses serve as a useful disguise if you happen to get something in your eye during the moving finale…)

Mark Kermode has videoblogged on the subject, wondering whether watching Toy Story 3 would be every bit as involving in 2D. My opinion is that it would still be a fantastic and immersive movie, but I have to admit that in this case the 3D does seem to add something.

Of course, this is animation, and totally different from live action movies. I still cringe at the thought of 3D becoming the standard for every major film release. But, in the case of Toy Story 3, Pixar has proved that, used cleverly and in the context of a great film, 3D can actually be a positive thing in movies. I, for one, never expected that.