I dreamt last night that I met the Brazilian national football team. In particular, I was chatting to Kaká. I don’t remember much of the conversation, but I do recall asking him whether, during his formative years at São Paulo (1999-2003), he had been aware of the emergence of current Arsenal player Denílson, who also found his footballing feet at São Paulo (2005-2006) before making his way to North London.

This – the fact that Kaká and Denílson started out at the same club – is not an association I had made before. It’s not a particularly significant association, but I was nonetheless very impressed that I was able to make it while subconscious.

And that’s it. I know being told about other people’s dreams is interminably boring, but I thought this one was too surreal to be kept secret.

Apologies once again for the complete absence of any new posts over the last fortnight. I am still without internet and have been out of the country for the past week.

I will be making my second Eurosport appearance this evening (Wednesday), providing coverage of the San Marino v Wales game. If you care to join me for minute-by-minute updates, the website is http://uk.eurosport.yahoo.com/football/euro/ and kick-off is at 19:15 GMT.

Incidentally, my match report on the Lazio v Real Madrid game (see below) can be found here: http://uk.eurosport.yahoo.com/04102007/58/champions-league-group-c-square-rome.html.

I’m afraid blogging will probably be reduced to a minimum from now on, but I will still endeavour to write something whenever a heart-stopping goal or exciting young player catches my eye.

Until then…

Sincere apologies for the lack of blogging action of late. I moved to London last week in search of my fame and fortune, and am currently, frustratingly sans internet.

On the fame and fortune front, I will be making my debut for Eurosport on Wednesday night, providing live text commentary on the Lazio v Real Madrid game. Join me at http://uk.eurosport.yahoo.com/football/champions-league/. Kick-off is at 19:45 GMT.

It seems unnecessary to say it, but Jose Mourinho will undoubtedly be missed. He brought so much to football in this country, and our native football journalism will be all the poorer for his abrupt departure.

But it is the football journalists, rather than the fans, who will miss him the most. A lot of fans tired of his ungracious moaning and shameless referee-baiting a long time ago, but when you read the testimonies of journalists who have spoken to him face-to-face, you get an impression of a warm, charming and immensely generous individual who couldn’t be any further removed from the endlessly parodied cardboard cut-out ‘Special One’ so readily paraded before us at pre-match press conferences and post-match interviews.

Mourinho certainly did a great deal for English football. Tactically, he introduced a counter-attacking 4-3-3 formation that – in his first season at least – was breath-takingly efficient, and which has since been aped by managers the length and breadth of the country.

He developed promising young English players like John Terry, Frank Lampard and Joe Cole into the genuinely – OK, occasionally – world-class performers they are today, gave Eidur Gudjohnsen the chance to prove himself a midfield artisan of the highest quality and placed sufficient faith in Didier Drogba to enable him to become one of the most complete centre forwards in the world.

Likewise, he reminded us that, behind every media-peddled stock image of a manager – Ferguson the Firebrand, Wenger the Scholar – is a man, with a family and concerns of his own that have absolutely nothing to do with the over-hyped, endlessly self-publicising Premiership.

But, for all this, we must be careful not to overstate his achievements. He certainly produced a tremendously successful team at Chelsea - galvanised by a team spirit that, for all the rather stage-managed training ground joshing appears to be real and lasting – but he was nonetheless able to do so thanks to a quite simply incredible budget that is unprecedented in English football.

Yes, he brought the Premiership trophy to Stamford Bridge – twice – but he inherited a team already brimming with international talent that had finished second in the league (behind Arsenal’s 2003-2004 Invincibles) and reached the semi-finals of the Champions League.

He produced a trophy-winning team capable of playing brutally effective football, but how many top European managers would be confident of achieving similar results if given a budget of hundreds of millions of pounds?

And for all the success that players like Drogba, Michael Essien and Petr Cech achieved, let’s not forget the turkeys. Over £57 million were spent on Paulo Ferreira, Mateja Kezman, Asier del Horno and Andriy Shevchenko, not to mention free transfer Michael Ballack. Mourinho may have lamented how his team struggled without John Terry, Frank Lampard and Didier Drogba in the side, but with the resources at his disposal it’s hard to feel genuinely sympathetic.

The less palatable elements of Mourinho’s managerial style must not be overlooked either. For all his great soundbites and mischievous charm, he remained a terribly ungracious loser, and was partly responsible for hounding Anders Frisk – one of the best referees of the last 10 years – into retirement in 2005.

Mourinho was – and is – a truly gifted manager. He brought a style both on and off the pitch which had never been seen before on these shores, and he achieved notable success. But he was also, at times, deeply unpleasant, and for all his love him-hate him popularity, his most impressive achievement to date remains the Champions League trophy he won with Porto in 2004. That was a team he can genuinely claim to have crafted himself.

The record books will show that Chelsea were an ambitious, underachieving club who suddenly won everything there was to win in the domestic game following the arrival of a Russian billionaire. The sad thing for Mourinho is that he wasn’t given the time to intertwine his own story with Chelsea’s more irrevocably, and for that the blame must lie squarely with Roman Abramovich and Peter Kenyon and a Stamford Bridge hierarchy that expected too much too soon.

If they want to know what the future holds for Chelsea Football Club now, it might be an idea to cast their minds back to the summer of the 2003, and the departure from Real Madrid of a certain Vincente Del Bosque…

“Totti is a luxury player.”

- Graeme Souness’s considered opinion of Francesco Totti – that’s the same Francesco Totti who scored 26 league goals for Roma last season – sheds light on why he was such a complete and utter failure as a manager and why he’s now reduced to trotting out half-arsed, ill-informed platitudes as a pundit on Sky Sports.

The fans in the Bernabeu may have given in to the odd bout of impatient whistling, the home defence may have been exposed with worryingly familiar frequency and Ruud van Nistelrooy may have spurned a hatful of chances before notching the goal that proved to be the winner, but there was enough in Real Madrid’s 2-1 win over Werder Bremen in the Champions League on Tuesday night to suggest that Bernd Schuster’s post-Capello revolution is well underway.

Mindful of the Madridistas’ disdainful attitude towards the defensive tactics of his predecessor, Schuster arrived at the Bernabeu promising to create a team capable of a brand of fluid, attacking football more in keeping with the traditions of Puskas, Gento, Di Stefano and co.

The key difference against Bremen was one of shape. Whereas Capello favoured a 4-2-3-1 with Diarra and Emerson (who has now been shipped off to Milan) protecting the back four and van Nistelrooy ploughing a lone furrow up front, Schuster fielded a 4-1-3-2, with Fernando Gago the sole holding midfielder, Raul alongside van Nistelrooy up front, Wesley Schneijder and Gonzalo Higuain attacking from the flanks, and Guti setting the pace in the middle.

The tactical shift made for more cohesive use of the ball in the final third, with Schneijder, Guti and Higuain linking up well with Raul to provide chances for van Nistelrooy. Raul seems to relish being restored to the role of centre forward, and he turned in a tigrish, industrious performance illuminated by some wonderful touches.

Playing with no less than three attacking midfielders enabled Madrid to introduce all manner of different patterns to their play, and with Bremen’s central defenders and central midfielders preoccupied, there was plenty of room on the flanks for full-backs Sergio Ramos and the impressive Brazilian Marcelo to exploit.

Typically, Madrid were often caught short at the back, and with the impish, artful Diego prompting in midfield, Bremen went close on occasion. But then, that is the beauty of Madrid, as it is with Brazil. They exist to play attacking football, and when it clicks – as it did on occasion here – it is wonderful to behold.

And with Diarra, Gabriel Heinze, Royston Drenthe, Arjen Robben, Julio Baptista, Robinho and Javier Saviola also in the squad, this might just be the season that Madrid add another European Cup to the nine they have already won in such sparkling style.

58 minutes into a group stage game against Sweden in the Women’s World Cup in China, and US striker Abby Wambach demonstrates a combination of touch and ruthless finishing beyond the reach of even accomplished male strikers:

Not bad for a girl eh?

A few months ago I wrote about the greatest hat-trick of all-time, and came to the conclusion that few could better the stunning trio of goals that Rivaldo scored for Barcelona against Valencia in the final game of the 2001-2002 season.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, we have ourselves a new contender. Step forward River Plate captain Fernando Belluschi, who scored three absolute screamers in an Argentine league game against Velez Sarsfield yesterday.

For his first, he nutmegged an opponent and then unleashed a left-footed 25-yard belter that cannoned off the crossbar and went in.

His second saw him hang, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon-style in the air before despatching a cool left-footed volley into the top left-hand corner (which eventually found the back of the net via the keeper’s hand, the crossbar and then the keeper’s backside).

He saved his best till last, exchanging passes with a team-mate from a short corner and then curling a delicious lob into the far corner with his right foot.

Mind you, anything Belluschi can do, Rivaldo can do better…

England 3-0 Israel. Fair enough. A good performance. Three pleasing goals. But those English fans who booed David Bentley are complete morons.

Yes, he pulled out of the Under-21 European Championships in the summer, citing fatigue. Yes, he probably fancies himself as a bit of a player. But the sight of a crowd actively – enthusiastically – booing one of their own players was quite ridiculous.

Whatever you may think of David Bentley, he nonetheless remains a truly exciting young player. He can pass, and shoot, with either foot. He is dangerous from set pieces. He can beat a man. He scores goals. He has vision.

And yet England’s fans berate him for daring to declare that he was fatigued after a long season. Perhaps he was wrong, but he is still one of England’s most promising young players, and the reception he received at Wembley on Saturday night suggests England’s fans are more eager to peddle the agenda of an unimaginative press than to support a team that might – given time, and space, and patience – have a hope of achieving something beyond a dismal quarter-final defeat on penalties at Euro 2008.

It’s at times like this that one realises that the single most distasteful thing about England is not their pathetically unimaginative manager or their unjustifiably delusional aspirations towards grandeur, but their lumpen, lazy, boo-because-everyone-else-does supporters.

Pierluigi Casiraghi’s Italy Under-21s had a lucky escape when they only just managed to scrape past the Faroe Islands with a 2-1 home victory in an Under-21 European Championship qualifier in Trento last night.

The senior side may currently lie bottom of European Championship Qualifying Group B, but they’re not the wretched whipping boys they once were. The gap between the top teams and the weaker teams in Europe is certainly closing.

The highlights of the Under-21 game are worth watching if only for the Faroe Islands’ equalising goal, when defender Einar Hansen ambled into the Italian half and, spotting Italy keeper Andrea Consigli absent-mindedly straying from his line, swept the ball home from fully 45 yards.