For once Sir Alex Ferguson was wrong about Ruud van Nistelrooy. Bemoaning the wasted opportunities at Portsmouth, a match for which the Dutchman was suspended, the Manchester United manager remarked: “Give Ruud four chances in a game and he’ll take three of them.”

For once Sir Alex Ferguson was wrong about Ruud van Nistelrooy. The Spanish paper Marca reported that the former Portuguese international has been made a two-year offer from Manchester United if he can negotiate his way out of Madrid.”I’m 32, I’ve got a year and a half left on my contract and the time has come to make decisions. Luis Figo has given Real Madrid a December deadline to make it clear whether or not they intend to offer him a new contract.
The former European Footballer of the Year, who was 32 yesterday, said that if the club does not plan to extend his present deal, which expires in 2006, he would leave at the end of this season. I want to know as soon as possible what Real want,” Figo, who was on the verge of joining United before he went to Barcelona in 1995, said.The United defender Wes Brown has agreed a new deal that will tie him to Old Trafford until 2008.. Try telling that to Vieira and Tommassi, or the people they help..

Their presence was indicative of the respect Vieira commands, for he is one of the four founders of Diambars The others are also footballers. Bernard Lama, the French goalkeeper who had a brief spell with West Ham and shared the original inspiration with the former Hibernian player Jimmy Adjovi-Boco, who played with Lama at Lens and Lille, and Saer Seck, a noted Senegalese footballer.Football may be mired in bad publicity but the game has been associated with charitable causes for many years from the Charity (now Community) Shield to the annual Christmas hospital visits. What is new is a degree to which players are now acting on their own initiative rather than at the behest of clubs and organisations.It says much about the modern players’ level of wealth, but also about their celebrity status Men like Vieira open doors around the world. He is arguably the most famous person of Senegalese extraction. This combination of economic power and cultural prestige has an enabled Diambars to attract blue chip sponsors and the support of Unesco together with government agencies in France and Senegal. It is the reason Vieira expects that two of the 1,000 signed commemorative shirts put on sale yesterday via the website ( ) yesterday will be bought by Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac.The aim of Diambars (which means “warrior-like” in Wolof, the language of Senegal) is both to develop good footballers and to educate them in an impressively well thought out campus.

It is an attempt to avoid the current situation in which promising Africans are taken to Europe at an early age by agents but often deserted there having been injured or failed to make the grade.”I am in a very privileged position and if I use it the right way I can help inspire kids to write their own path in life,” Vieira said yesterday. Name one.Oh, well, I bet you can’t ban spanking, he said.So I did.I announced that, as part of our anti-terrorist measures, spanking would be banned forthwith.They fell for it.Gordon Brown now owes me £100.But now my intelligence services tell me that a vast new outbreak of unparalleled terrorist offences is expected all over Britain.Very soon.Today, in fact.This will take the shape of a concerted series of explosions mounted indiscriminately throughout the home counties. Damiano Tommassi, Roma’s Italian international, gave 30 per cent of his salary to charity for several seasons and spent an off-season on a construction site building low-cost housing for immigrants.Footballers, eh? Only interested in themselves. The exception is the Andy Cole Children’s Foundation, an organisation founded and developed by the Fulham striker to help children round the world.All these initiatives are admirable but one footballer has gone beyond them all. Niall Quinn donated the £1m from his testimonial, primarily to children’s hospitals. Gary Kelly donated the profits from his testimonial to cancer charities.

We never forget our roots.”English players’ charitable involvement tends to be through established organisations. Most of them originate from outside wealthy western Europe.”Maybe the reason South American and African players want to put so much back is that in their homeland they were brought up with the gulf between rich and poor, and the realities of life and death,” Vieira said. “Perhaps we have different family values because of the poverty we faced or lack of infrastructure in our country. Cafu, Juan Sebastian Veron and Pavel Nedved are among those engaged in similar initiatives (see table). “I have known Jimmy, Bernard and Saer for a long time and we have spoken about our dream for many years so it is amazing to see it come to fruition.”The quartet are not alone. He came down to London to mount a protest, opposite the gates of the Houses of Parliament. Three years ago Mr Brian Haw, a carpenter and evangelical Christian from Redditch in Worcestershire, decided something had to be done about the Government.

In fact, he has been there ever since, protesting for 1,250 days. What his original protest was about, I could not tell you, since it began in the summer of 2001, before 11 September, and has since followed public events. Since the invasion of Afghanistan and the war in Iraq, Mr Haw has been making placards against the conduct of the Prime Minister. Now, his protest expresses outrage against the Prime Minister’s statements to the House of Commons and to the country about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.The placards cover an entire side of Parliament Square, and say things like “Stop Bloody Zionism Freedom for Palestine and Iraq, Chechnya, Terrorist N1 [what, Islington?] USA, UK, Israel, Russia.” Mr Haw enlivens parliamentary debate by chanting slogans through a megaphone; “Tony B, Liar” is a favourite.He keeps it up all day and all night, and is always there. The House of Commons has slowly moved from “Well, of course, important democratic right, etc etc” to “Christ, enough is enough, how can we get rid of him?” Nothing has worked. At one point, the police removed all his placards; Mr Haw just wrote them all again.