SATURDAY'S world cup draw and its aftermath raise three important questions in advance of next year's football festival;

Firstly, why do sporting organisers insist on turning their big events into a bizarre cultural jamboree?

People who watch these things tend to be sports fans. Sports fans, as a rule, watch these things because they like sport. Are you following me so far?

People who like sport don't necessarily like traditional Korean dancing, 'racy' Asian pop starlets and tuneless Japanese opera singers.

By all means make a night of it, a quick song and dance number showing off the local culture never hurt anyone, but, please, when we already have a devilishly complicated draw to contend with, can we just get on with it? Saturday's farce was more like the Eurovision song contest than the prelude to the world's greatest sporting competition.

As for the football, you really have to question the seeding situation. If Italy don't get to the final, then something is seriously wrong in the land of Juventus and Milan.

Not content with a fairly straightforward looking group, the Azzurri are, if they somehow manage to overcome Equador, Mexico and Croatia, kept apart from Brazil, Argentina and France.

The only other team of note in their half of the contest with serious World Cup pedigree is Germany, while unheralded sides like Portugal and Spain are certainly no more of a threat than teams who are going to face a battle to get through the group stages elsewhere.

On to England. We are, apparently, faced with a lunchtime clash against our old chums from Argentina. Hopefully we're past the 'these Argies don't like subs/keep them out of our exclusion zone' type humour which prevailed circa 1986 and we can get on with enjoying England's first ever indoor game. In a stadium with, apparently, no lights.

Yes, that's right, it appears that the 43,000 spectators in Sapporo will have to bring torches while the players run around in miner's hats.

That's if some of the more outrageous suggestions in this week's papers are to be believed. Don't worry, by next week their will be another minor scandal to distract everyone while keeping 'the FIFA World Cup Korea/Japan 2002' in the headlines.

It will probably be food next, or maybe ticket touting, crime, squadrons of hard core hooligans being recruited from across the world to fight on the beaches of the Far East.

Then we might, sometime next May, start talking about football.