Day 10. The baked beans controversy rumbled on. After the English Football Association took them off the players' menu in France, Alan Shearer, the team's very own gas man, was hauled before the ITV cameras yesterday afternoon to give his views on the matter. (This is one of the perks of being captain).

"At the end of the day, it's a team game Brian, it's not about individuals and it doesn't really matter who puts the ball in the back of the net, at the end of the day, so long as we win," he said.

Then they unstuck his needle, allowing him to give his views on beans. "I never eat them anyway," he declared. You could almost hear the sound of beans share prices tumbling to the floor in England. In fact Shearer's revelation has probably just done for beans what Edwina Currie did for eggs a few years back.

Damage limitation time for beans makers everywhere. "I ate beans when we won the World Cup in 1966," Sky News reported Roger Hunt as proclaiming. Zidane endorses Adidas, Ronaldo is Nike's man, Hunt backs Heinz. Is there no end to the commercialisation of football? So, like Asprilla, the beans were sent home, which is probably where most of Day Nine's refs should be sent. The Niall and Andy Show invited viewers to share their opinions on the glut of red cards (which look orange on my screen - have they been Tangoed?). "If yer man Blatter had his way all the players'd be going around with skirts on," complained Stephen from Dublin, which is a novel way of saying `it's a man's game'.

"Absolutely, if we go down this road in the Premiership next season I'll be out of a job," nodded a worried Andy, who's not sure he has the pace to tackle from the front anymore. Andy, incidentally, is coming along fine in his new job as a telly person but is still inclined to wear that badger-caught-in-the-headlights look when he has to talk to camera, relishing it as much as a 50-50 tackle with Roy Keane. Niall, on the other hand, is fast becoming the Mary Kennedy of sports telly presenting - he treats the camera as his best friend and is so laid back about the whole experience that he's nearly tumbled backwards off his chair a couple of times. Anyway, there's a lot to be said for this sudden clampdown on innocuous challenges, namely that it reduces Norway, Belgium and Austria's chances of keeping 11 men behind the ball for the entire duration of their final group games. Ten maybe, or nine, depending on how many players they have sent off.

Alex Ferguson, appearing on ITV's World Cup Encore, thought Zinedine Zidane's `stamp' on the Saudi Arabian player on Thursday night, for which he received a red card, was innocuous, too, but then, some might say, 'he had to say that, hadn't he', having spent four years defending un autre Frenchman doing similarly naughty things on the field of play. For his own sake one hopes Dieu's successor at United, one Edward Sheringham, wasn't tuning in via satellite to World Cup Encore. Having apologised to United fans earlier in the day, for drinking in Portugal, not for signing for the club in the first place, Sheringham said he hoped his future at the club was safe.

"Well Alex, should Sheringham be worried about his future with you and Manchester United?" Jim Rosenthal asked Ferguson. "Absolully noh, Teddy is at the centre of ma plans for the next five years," he didn't say.

Instead. "I think all the players will worry at our club when they don't win something . . . I think it reflects Terry's concern about not winning, he's only a year at the club and he now realises what Manchester United's about," he said.

Yes, he called him Terry and, no, absence clearly has not made the heart grow any fonder. In fact, Alex stopped just short of saying: `One used striker, bloody useless, free transfer or nearest offer'.