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Get your Cricket Free Bets registered ready for the coming tests with England against Sri Lanka as Steve Harmison and Matthew Hoggard fight to get fit and to fighting form to face the host nation in the coming series.

Spin always plays a part and from the Sri Lankans’ point of view and they’ll try to exploit the pitches. We’ve got great spin bowlers to counter this part of their armoury but I can’t help feeling that these coming tests may be decided by pace and who can take the wickets whilst the spinners take a break.

The pace men won’t get too much assistance from the pitches which makes me feel that Steve Harmison will be nullified as he will lose his main weapon of bounce and he doesn’t move it very much laterally. Mallinger to me will be one of the key bowlers in this series because he has mastered the yorker. This means he will take the pitch out of the equation and fire those 90 mph toe crunchers at the english batsmen on a regular basis. I’m sure Peter Moores has thought this through but let’s see how the players defend against Mallinger when they are out in the middle and the pressure (as well as the heat!) is on.

Ok, so Steve McClaren has gone after one of the most unsuccessful 12 match runs in English football betting history and  bets turn their attention to the next manager.  Paddy Power have placed him 4/1 to replace McClaren but the sports betting world, as well as every English football fan, needs an answer to a longer term question : why can’t we produce our own international manager?

After Scotland’s heartbreak at the start of this week, England have their own to deal with now and the hurt seems to run even deeper as the thought of a Euro 2008 competition without our national side seems inconceivable. But that is reality and we now need to look to the future.

Short term, yes - Jose will be a superb manager for our team and he may well demonstrate that we do actually have the players in this country to be successful at the top level. But what about when he retires? We will still be in the same position of scratching round for a good manager from outside the UK unless something fundamental changes in this country. It would be an idea to form a football coaching academy that concentrates purely on this facet of the game and builds a pool of top level coaches from which we can then choose when the need arises.

At the moment, the FA seem to be struggling to have a strategy in place to follow when a coach doesn’t perform. Sven Erikson seemed to overstay his welcome but there was no one else who you could say would have been able to fill the post any better.

Investment in our national side’s coaching future needs to be made now. You can’t build this system in months - it takes years.

Scottish football betting fans watched eagerly as their country went down to the world champions earlier this week. Football free bets were used for newcomers to avail of odds on the scots providing a shock in this game, even after going down by one goal in only the second minute.

I find it tragic for Scotland as they constantly come so close in matches like this. You have to imagine that if they had a bigger pool of players to draw on, what could they achieve? Scotland the Brave wasn’t a phrase coined for no reason and the Scots deserve better than they get. The manager has to shoulder responsibility in a game like this but if it had been a draw - and it so nearly was - it would have been a different story and he would have been a hero.

There aren’t many sides in the world who work harder and battle harder than Scotland but sometimes they could do with a bit more luck and maybe a bit more flare, it has to be said. How must it feel to be a Scotland fan after matches like this? All countries have had there downers in all sports but Scotland’s big chance to overturn a favourite don’t come along that often and the way this game finished on a very strange free kick decision outside the Scots 18 yard box, well no one would wish it on anyone!