"It was a circus,” Rio Ferdinand claimed, alleging that distraction caused by the WAGs in Baden-Baden badly hampered England's 2006 World Cup finals campaign. “It won't happen again,” Adrian Bevington, the FA's director of communications, promised.

Now, using your skill and judgment, answer the following questions, designed to test your knowledge of the 2006 tournament. Then arrive at your own verdict on the big question that everyone is asking: “Was it the WAGs wot lost it?”

1. When the World Cup 2006 quarter-final between England and Portugal went to a penalty shoot-out, which of the following stepped up to the spot and missed, thereby sending England home? Choose three from five.

a) Frank Lampard b) Steven Gerrard c) Jamie Carragher d) Elen Rives e) Cassie Sumner

2. Who was it who, only 62 minutes into the match, in a fit of impotent rage, took the unwise decision to stamp on genitals belonging to Ricardo Carvalho, of Portugal, thus earning a red card and reducing England to ten men at a time they could have least done with it?

a) Wayne Rooney b) Louise Bonsall c) Kelly Ellison

3. The spat between Rooney and Cristiano Ronaldo, his Manchester United team-mate, that arose in the aftermath of England v Portugal was:

a) just handbags b) actual Prada handbags, worth about €600 each and purchased in Baden-Baden during the course of a slightly boring Tuesday afternoon

4. The reason that Portugal went farther than England in the 2006 World Cup is that:

a) they were, in the end, a more coherent side b) Portuguese footballers don't let women come anywhere near them, ever

5. During the group stage, England failed to break down the mighty Trinidad & Tobago for 83 minutes because:

a) England's retention of the ball was abysmal b) Trinidad & Tobago is technically two countries, which isn't fair c) Carly Zucker didn't pack quite enough bikinis

6. The dull-witted performance in which England stuttered to a group-stage victory over Paraguay, thanks to a solitary own goal, can be blamed entirely upon:

a) underpreparation b) the team's traditional tendency to get off to “a slow start” at the leading tournaments c) Victoria Beckham's hotpants

7. England's inability to change their approach or alter the pace during their gobsmackingly laborious 1-0 victory over limited Ecuador in the round of 16 arose from:

a) a startling amount of inflexibility in the response of Sven-Göran Eriksson to football matches as they developed in front of his eyes b) a bad hair day for Michaela Henderson-Thynne

8. Only one of the following people went into the 2006 World Cup without an autobiography all lined up on the presses and ready to go, bar the addition of a quick turnaround, and hopefully story-clinching, closing chapter and a little tickle to the preface. Can you name that one person?

a) Frank Lampard b) Steven Gerrard c) Rio Ferdinand d) Ashley Cole e) Krystell Sidwell

9. Things might have worked out better for England in Germany had they been able to call, throughout, on the services of a fully fit:

a) Michael Owen b) David Beckham c) Danielle Lloyd

10. Directly after the tournament, which of the following made clear their belief that England “deserved” to go farther than they did?

a) Frank Lampard b) an Australian freelance paparazzo hiding in a bush outside the England team hotel

11. In retrospect, and given what later developed, would it have made much difference if the England head coach's job had passed, after this tournament, from Eriksson to:

a) Steve McClaren or b) Coleen McLoughlin?

12. In their preparations for leading tournaments, England are hampered by a thwarted sense of entitlement that dates all the way back to:

a) 1966 b) 1066 c) The dawn of time d) Sheree Murphy

13. During the tournament, whose candidly complacent opinion was it that it wouldn't matter if England played badly in every match, as long as they won?

a) Rio Ferdinand's, in an interview with the BBC b) Alex Curran's, in an interview with Closer

14. For the general advancement of England's prospects at international level, it would be better if all the people connected with the national team stopped:

a) making pathetic excuses for underachieving b) having wives and girlfriends

That's it. Pens down. How did you get on? Don't forget to check the answers on page 430 of next week's OK! magazine.

Medal should be ticket to ride London bus

The broad feeling about Thursday's Heroes Parade, honouring Great Britain's 149 Olympic and Paralympic Games medal-winners, was that it came a bit late. Heaven help us. Are people's memories really so short? So what if the Olympics ended on August 24. So what if autumn has come and almost gone, the world has tipped into recession and another one of Madonna's marriages has ended. Such things are merely ephemeral. Silver for whatsername in the thingummy, on the other hand, is permanent.

No, if we had a problem with this week's honorifics in London, it was nothing to do with their timing. It was to do with their seemingly casual use of 12 flat-bed trucks and not even one open-top bus, of the kind extended on previous occasions to cricketers and rugby union players.

What was going on here? At the closing ceremony in Beijing, London offered the world a bus that was also, in its spare time, a hedge. A bus that launched Leona Lewis, in Miss Haversham's wedding dress, to a height of about 35 feet. A bus that produced not just Jimmy Page, but also David Beckham and a Blue Peter competition-winner.

To descend from this to Thursday's unglamorous procession of articulated lorries with green dustbins positioned along them was a spectacular come-down. Did old matey - you know the one - really grab glory in the whatever it was to be shipped across London like an order of wall-cladding from Travis Perkins? The heroes deserved better.

Things Footballers Never Used To Say In The Old Days - Number 503

“I've had the Battle of Pilleth depicted on my arm.” (Craig Bellamy, talking the media through the significance of his latest tattoo.) Apparently, the West Ham United and Wales forward's latest permanent body adornment - a complex tribute in black ink to Owain Glyndwr, the medieval Welsh nationalist - was two years in the making, although surely Craig wasn't face down in the tattoo parlour, gritting his teeth, for the whole of that time.

The two years must have included an extensive research and development phase. Anyway, it's an undeniably bold statement, and one that considerably ups the ante in this highly competitive area of the modern game.

Next week, Steve Sidwell on why he has spent three years having the Bayeux Tapestry reproduced on his stomach.