Skills? What skills?

To the winners, the spoils. To the losers … just the spoiled stuff.

Pre-World Cup, England’s Wayne Rooney and Steven Gerrard were all set to cash in on their inevitable wondrous success in South Africa with a whizz-bang show at London’s O2 arena, complete with vuvuzelas. Possibly.

Some of the world’s other soccer superstars were going to join them – Cristiano Ronaldo, Cesc Fabregas, Didier Drogba and David Villa – in something called A:3K Football, which would have required them to ponce about showing off their skills in front of a live audience.

And it was going to be staged a week after the World Cup final.

But after their abject exit from the World Cup super flop Rooney and his equally floppy skipper Gerrard figured there weren’t enough saps in London to fill one of those cute red phone boxes, let alone a stadium that can house 23,000, so they pulled out, leaving organisers to postpone the event for a year.

A promotional suit sobbed optimistically that all tickets would be honoured for next year’s event, but we suspect that’s the last we’ll hear of this little enterprise.

Cheerful in defeat

Meanwhile the incompetent fools who helped ruin Rooney and Gerrard’s nice little earner have been enjoying themselves, rather than sticking red hot pokers into their eyes or whatever it is that the English tabloids expect their footballers to do when they’ve snuffed it in yet another major tournament.

A photo taken by defender Ledley King on his phone, and leaked to the papers, shows England players, just hours after their defeat against Germany, smoking cigars! With their feet up! Smiling! And relaxing with a few beers! How dare they!

So far as we can tell from the blurry image, yes, one player is smoking a cigar and another appears to be smiling. Beer cans are visible, and one player seems to be drinking red wine. A Bacchanalian outrage, the lot of it.

The wheels of justice

The nincompoop “fan” who stormed into the England dressing room in Cape Town after the dismal draw with Algeria to yell at David Beckham, who wasn’t even in the squad, has been fined 750 rand ($115) after pleading guilty in court to being an idiot.

Pavlos Joseph now has himself a criminal record, while Sunday Mirror journalist Simon Wright is in the clink facing charges of “defeating the ends of justice” and flouting the Immigration Act.

The assertion is that Wright orchestrated Joseph’s intrusion to try to bring World Cup security into disrepute.

And he didn’t even have to dress as an Arab sheikh in the process.

A Mirror spokesman huffed, “It was an absolutely legitimate story that he was involved in,” adding, perhaps not too helpfully, that Wright had “conducted himself perfectly properly as he would have here in the UK”. That’s a guilty plea then.

O’Keefe? Oh lord

There were high fives all around The Circus tent when we heard that Kerry O’Keeffe had been added to the Australian test squad for the matches against Pakistan in England.

We love Skull, with his bald head and his silly giggling … so what that he is about 78 and never could bowl even when he was young.

But wait. Stephen O’Keefe, you say. Who?

Well – and here’s a surprise – he plays for New South Wales, now and then. In fact, he has pulled on the whites in a mighty eight first-class matches in five years. Excellent credentials for a test debut.

The numbers game

3 – countries that backed not-at-all-divisive ex-Australian PM Little Johnny Howard’s bid to become president of the International Cricket Council

6 – countries that signed a letter opposing his candidacy

1 – country left over – Zimbabwe – that also didn’t want him

Quote of the day

“I feel a broken man, completely disconsolate, frustrated and an unimaginable sadness.” – Portugal’s Cristiano Ronaldo keeps his team’s World Cup defeat at the hands of Spain in perspective. Perhaps he could offer the quote to Little Johnny Howard

Headline we’d like to read

“Pfft. It’s just a game, says Ronaldo”