England’s World Cup Magic DVD –  

England’s World Cup Magic is a limited edition box-set celebrating the England football team and its current incarnation’s qualification for the 2002 World Cup, featuring over six hours of action on three discs. England’s Dream Ticket follows England from the ignominious Wembley defeat at the hands of Germany to the last-gasp Beckham-bender at Old Trafford against Greece. Highlights of all the matches, including friendlies against Spain, Mexico and Holland are interspersed with episodes on Sven and Wembley, and capture a sense of the media-frenzy that follows the team. Germany 1 England 5 charts that glorious September 2001 evening, offering the full BBC (Motson, Brooking) coverage of the match. Finally, The England Collection is an entertaining though somewhat flawed hall-of-fame, featuring 50 players who have graced the England team (three keepers, 13 defenders, 18 midfielders, 16 strikers). Some of the selections and omissions are hard to understand, and there is a distinct bias towards the post-1980s, presumably because of lack of rights to footage. Extra sections on 30 best goals, the Next Generation and Bloopers, are fun but still missing valuable players. On the DVD: England’s World Cup Magic contains lots of extras spread across the three discs, including scene selection; exclusive interviews with Sven and his assistant Tord Grip; England U21 match highlights; text-only match statistics and player profiles; montages of top 10 qualification goals. The England Collection is essentially a file of nearly 100 programmes of around 60 seconds each and is poorly served by the technology–viewers have no option but to trawl through the bulk of the clips one at a time. –Alex Hankin