So it's a Sunday in the middle of June, you're sitting watching chaotic Italian football on Channel Four, while trying to recover from a week of ridiculous telephone calls about stupid transfer stories. Veron to United, Keane to Celtic, Frank Lampard worth £11 million.

So you look forward. A year from now it is possible you will have just been studying pictures from a place in Korea called Daejon where the qualifiers from Groups G and D will have met as the 2002 World Cup enters its third week and the competition really starts.

After that it will be off to Miyagi in Japan where it will be the turn of the qualifiers from Groups H and C.

Who will be participating, of course, is another matter. Observing the results last weekend after Europe's double-header, it was disappointing that those countries who always make it, Italy, Spain, Germany are almost certain to do so again. There is a lack of upset continent-wide, only Belarus of the emerging nations managing to startle allegedly superior opponents in Group Five.

Belarus may nudge out the Ukraine but even then it is for second place behind Poland.

Belarus drew 0-0 in the Ukraine in March and that was the closest the European qualifiers came to throwing up a serious surprise. There simply have been no massive shocks and that was part of the reason why it was so thrilling to be there when Estonia twice took the lead against Holland in Tallinn.

Then the Dutch came back, sadly. The Republic of Ireland actually deserve all the more praise for bucking the system in challenging the authority of Portugal and Holland.

Football, increasingly dominated by money and therefore increasingly open to monopolisation, needs this. Given we are just at the beginning of official investigations into drug abuse in the sport, and that those investigations are likely to end in the banning of many more players like Edgar Davids and Fernando Couto, it will be essential to the game's credibility the next World Cup does fascinate because of the events on the pitch.

Judging by the weather in the Confederations Cup and by the political rows between South Korea and Japan, the host nations may not be the most reliable when it comes to ensuring this.

So it will take the likes of Costa Rica and Belarus, should they get there, to give us some enhanced drama. There is one promising omen among all the doubts - the plight of Brazil.

There have been 16 World Cups since the first in 1930 and Brazil have been at them all. In three of them, 1958, 1962 and 1970, they triumphed in such glorious style they earned themselves the reputation as the global spiritual guardians of the beautiful game. If the planet were playing Mars, the wearer of Brazil's number 10 jersey would be first name on the team sheet.

Then in 1982 Brazil had one of their best-ever sides yet lost out to Italy, but they did so with panache. They were still for many the world's champions.

That, though, was nearly 20 years ago. Brazil won the World Cup in America in 1994 but by then, although they continued to be stroked by a long-memoried and wishful thinking media, the football was not what it had been. Glorious style had given way to pragmatic substance.

Four years later the sense that the magic of the yellow shirts was starting to fade was confirmed by France and Zinedine Zidane in Paris. Brazil's great white hope, Ronaldo, was a shell of his former self.

That he remains so is one of the explanations why Brazil currently sit fourth behind Argentina, Paraguay and Ecuador in the South America qualifying group. The top four qualify automatically but when Brazil travel to Uruguay on Wednesday week they will do so in the knowledge they have not won there since 1976 and that a Uruguay victory will leave them on the same points as Brazil with Colombia just two points behind with three games to play.

The fifth place in the mini-league has a play-off with Australia for the privilege of flying down to Tokyo but given that Australia have just beaten Brazil in the Confederations Cup there is a growing fear that the yellow jerseys boarding the plane will have names like Kewell and Okon attached to them.

As reported elsewhere on these pages, a new manager has been installed, Luiz Felipe "Big Phil" Scolari, after the previous incumbents, Wanderley Luxemburgo and Emerson Leao had been ousted, and a veteran of '94, the aggressive defender Mauro Silva has been instantly recalled. Ronaldo is back in training.

Yet a newspaper recently ran the headline: "Could the Unthinkable Happen?" as all eyes move to Uruguay. They are starting to think so, and so maybe we should prepare to consider Seoul and Yokohama without the samba cliches.

Would that be such a bad thing? Come on Belarus.