The pictures of David Beckham hopping on his now infamous left foot on a trampoline in Jeju stadium calmed the nerves of many a worried England fan this week.
Anxiety over the Manchester United star's fitness began to melt away as he kicked a few balls around the pitch. However, in the superstitious world of football, the fans appeared ready to forgive England's lacklustre performance against the South Koreans as a trade-off for the England captain's fitness.
As England drew 1-1 in the magnificent Jeju stadium, a committee of MPs almost 6,000 miles away in London listened to damning evidence about the controversial project to build a new national stadium at Wembley.
The select committee of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport heard how the project has lurched from crisis to crisis since it was unveiled in July 1999.
Even if the £715 million stadium - the original cost estimate was £475 million - is built, it is expected to be the most expensive sports stadium in the world, far outstripping the £260 million spent on the Stade de France in Paris and the £250 million to build the Olympic stadium in Sydney. The huge increase in costs is mainly due to the fact that the existing Wembley stadium in north London stands idle and no one yet seems to know when, or if, it will be demolished.
Just as the Millennium Dome was an expensive embarrassment for Labour even after it closed, Wembley stadium is costing the Football Association about £1.5 million a month to maintain, making it, as one commentator described, "the most expensive white elephant in the history of British sport".
The issue of financing the project has also proved to be a major problem. The Football Association will contribute £100 million to the project but it had originally asked the government for £300 million. The bid was firmly rejected by ministers.
In September 2000, a joint plan to build the stadium by the Bovis construction firm and the Australian company, Multiplex, was rejected and Multiplex was chosen as the preferred sole contractor.
Then a deal between Wembley National Stadium Limited (WNSL), the Football Association subsidiary charged with building the new stadium, and Barclays Bank fell through days before completion.
In December last year, amid concerns about design and investment, the project hit another difficult patch.
In the style of the Chancellor's five economic tests on the euro, the Culture Secretary, Ms Tessa Jowell, halted the project and set WNSL five design and financial tests.
The project must provide value for money, proof of financing and prove that it could be used for athletics, Ms Jowell said, and WNSL must change its board as well as co-operate with the National Audit Office.
The government imposed a four-month deadline and indicated the project could move to Birmingham, much to the delight of West Midlands-based MPs, if the tests were not met. Earlier this month, however, a week after the deadline passed, Ms Jowell performed an about turn. With the Football Association close to securing a loan of about £400 million from the German bank, Westdeutsche Landesbank, Ms Jowell insisted she could not "pull the plug" on the project "when the prospects of success look better than ever".
And, crucially, she would not be setting another deadline.
In evidence to the select committee on Tuesday, Tropus, a firm of procurement consultants, told MPs that if the Wembley stadium project had been run more efficiently, about £100 million of the costs could have been saved.
Moreover, the Bovis-Multiplex bid was given "preferential treatment" and allowed access to documents other bidders did not have and WNSL management failed to establish a "realistic budget" with "strict parameters" for the stadium design. The criticisms were devastating for WNSL and the Football Association.
The National Audit Office will now launch an investigation to establish whether £120 million of National Lottery funds - allocated to WNSL to purchase the Wembley stadium plot - was used to get "value for money" for the government.
Such an investigation could also make it more difficult for Westdeutsche Landesbank to secure financial backers in the City of London .
With such uncertainty, can the government really endorse Wembley as the site of the new national stadium? If not, will Birmingham become the new home of English football?