Norway kept up their winning start to UEFA EURO 2012 qualifying despite a late fightback by Cyprus.

Two first-half goals ensured Norway kept up their winning start to UEFA EURO 2012 qualifying despite a late fightback by Cyprus.

Both teams made good starts in Group H last month, Norway beating Iceland and Portugal, while Cyprus held the latter 4-4. The Norwegians kept that going before the break in Larnaca, John Arne Riise and John Carew delighting the 2,000 travelling fans with goals, but Yiannis Okkas, on his 100th appearance, pulled one back with 32 minutes to go to ensure a nervy finish.

It took only two minutes for Norway to go in front with a swift counterattack, Erik Huseklepp releasing Riise to beat Antonis Georgallides with a cool left-footed finish. Norway had another chance on the quarter-hour but Huseklepp saw his effort cleared off the line by Georgos Merkis before Morten Gamst Pedersen's follow-up shot was well blocked by Georgallides.

Only in the 39th minute did Cyprus fashion a chance, Michalis Konstantinou heading Efstathios Aloneftis's clever cross high and wide. Instead, three minutes later, Norway doubled their advantage after another flowing move. Pedersen found Carew in the box and the striker skipped past Elias Charalambous before shooting into the bottom corner.

Cyprus emerged for the second half in positive fashion as Andreas Avraam had a powerful shot brilliantly tipped wide by Jon Knudsen. Just before the hour Constantinos Makridis chased a long ball to set up Okkas who marked his century of caps with his 24th goal. On 68 minutes the busy Aloneftis shot straight at Knudsen from close range and the ball rebounded off the bar. Aloneftis hit the crossbar again with an ambitious lob from just over the halfway line but Cyprus must now hope for better in Denmark on Tuesday. Norway's next game is at home to the Danes on 26 March and, with this third win, they go into the winter break in a strong position.

Montenegro boss Zlatko Kranjcar does not believe his side can stop England reaching the European Championships upcoming Euro 2012 qualifier

Kranjcar's side have made a good start to life in Group G, taking maximum points from their opening two games and could top the table on Friday should they take at least a point from Switzerland in Podgorica.England have also begun well with two wins out of two and are favourites to finish top of the standings to automatically qualify for the tournament in 2012.Montenegro travel to Wembley on Tuesday to face the Three Lions as underdogs for the encounter, with Kranjcar conceding that alongside fellow group rivals Switzerland, Wales and Bulgaria, they were competing for second place and a play-off spot."England is one of the best quality teams in European football and they won't feel the pressure, even if we come on Tuesday as group leaders," said Kranjcar, who is the father of Tottenham midfielder Niko."They are used to big games and know how to get the results through their system and their individual qualities.Competing"But it is possible for us to finish second. We are competing with teams like Switzerland, Bulgaria and Wales even if they are little bit above our level."All the teams are still in the hunt for second spot but I'm glad we are where we are."What I would like to have is the more relaxed team at Wembley, a team ready to compete with England and try to grab at least a point against them."Kranjcar snr also stated that he had learnt much about England's players from his son's time in the country, where he plays alongside the likes of Aaron Lennon, Peter Crouchand Tom Huddlestone at White Hart Lane."I speak with Niko regularly about football," he added."He gave me some valuable information like Frank Lampard not playing against us and that Wayne Rooney is in the squad even though he is being rested with Manchester United."Information like that can be very, very valuable.

Craig Bellamy has had knee problems for most of his career

Wales caretaker boss Brian Flynn has confirmed captain Craig Bellamy is out of Wales' Euro 2012 qualifiers against Bulgaria and Switzerland in October.The on-loan Cardiff City striker has been out for three weeks with a continuation of the knee problems that have dogged his career.Cardiff boss Dave Jones said on Monday he preferred the striker to be rested. "Craig will be unavailable for the two matches next week" Flynn told BBC Sport Wales. "I had a really long, excellent conversation with Dave Jones just over 10 days ago... and we made the decision that Craig will not be available due to his fitness. "He has an ongoing knee problem and hasn't played for the last five games."Obviously we've been aware of that and unfortunately for Craig and for us he won't be able to put on a red shirt next week. It's a big disappointment for me as caretaker manager. I wanted Craig in the team but these things happen." Wales face Bulgaria at the Cardiff City Stadium on 8 October, followed by Switzerland in Basel four days later. Having already lost their opening Group G game 1-0 away to supposed minnows Montenegro earlier this month, Wales cannot afford to slip up again if they are to keep their hopes alive.That result in Podgorica saw John Toshack depart as Wales manager, with his assistant and Wales Under-21 coach Brian Flynn appointed as caretaker boss for at least these next two games. Already without Premier League players such as Aaron Ramsey and and Jack Collison because of long-term injuries, the start to Flynn's Wales reign would be further hampered by the loss of captain Bellamy.

Bulgaria Has a New Coach

Bulgaria's new coach Lothar Matthaeus promised Thursday to revive the team and to try to convince Manchester United striker Dimitar Berbatov to return to the squad.

Berbatov quit the national team in May citing personal reasons and his absence is seen by many as having contributed to its weak start to European Championship qualifying.

Matthaeus pledged to do his best in persuading Berbatov to come back, saying "no matter what the motives of a player might be, he should always be ready to play for his national team."

The 49-year-old former Germany midfielder formally signed his one-year contract Thursday with an option for two more years. He replaces Stanimir Stoilov, who resigned after the team's defeats to England and Montenegro in the opening Euro 2012 qualifiers.

"It won't be easy at all after Bulgaria's losses to England and Montenegro ... but this is the great challenge for me," Matthaeus told reporters.

He said he will introduce an attacking style of play and voiced his belief that Bulgaria will make it to Euro 2012 and also to the 2014 World Cup in Brazil.

"I think Bulgaria has the capacity to become at least second in the Euro 2012 qualification group," Matthaeus said.

Bulgaria is in Group G with England, Montenegro, Switzerland and Wales.

England team Afraid To loose

England football manager Fabien Capello faces a defensive crisis for the England's Euro 2012 qualifier against Bulgaria.

Phil Jagielka was injured in his club, Everton's defeat to Aston Villa on Sunday. The centre-back suffered a swollen ankle having taken a nasty blow. He had been called up for the qualifiers against Bulgaria on Friday 3rd September and in Switzerland the following Tuesday. However now his injury has to be assessed and he will sit out training until England management decides if he is fit.

Everton manager David Moyes said that he was going to take Jagielka off at half time as his foot was badly swollen. Fabien Capello regards Jagielka as a critical part of his England squad for the Euro qualifiers and his injury is a major headache. If Jagielka does not recover, it will be a severe blow for Capello, who had him as a starter in central defence.

Capello has been forced to turn back to other options such as Matthew Upson, the West Ham defender, whose England career looked to be over after his poor performance at the World Cup. He had to decide against Ledley King who is suffering from his own injury problems. The decision to draft in Upson offers Capello experienced cover in addition to Gary Cahill and Michael Dawson who can boast only one cap between the two players.

Capello has lost several key players to injury. These include Frank Lampard who needs a hernia operation. Jermain Defoe has delayed a groin operation, while the team-mate, Peter Crouch, has been recalled even though his ripped back muscles are a cause for concern. Crouch looks doubtful for Friday's match against Bulgaria but remains in the squad in the hope that he will be fit by next week. Fulham goalkeeper David Stockdale, has injured an ankle also and it is thought he could be out for as much as 10 weeks.

The England manager knows that they need to win the qualifier against Bulgaria at Wembley to take off some of the pressure caused by their World Cup performance. If Jagielka is fit in time for the match he would most likely line-up alongside Tottenham defender, Michael Dawson.

The England football squad knows that they need to bounce back and restore pride in the team. The Bulgaria team has its own issues and failed to qualify for the World Cup. In their recent friendly encounter against Russia they lost 1-0. They know that they will face England on home turf in Wembley and that Capello's team will be rejuvenated as much as injury issues will allow.

England, who were surprise absentees from UEFA EURO 2008, will be determined to put that right in Group G against Switzerland, Bulgaria, Wales and Montenegro

England move up rankings to no 6/10

World champions Spain remain top of the table ahead of the Netherlands, who were runners up at last summer's World Cup finals in South Africa.

Germany, defeated by Spain in the semi-finals, move up to third place, switching places withBrazil in the process.

Fabio Capello's side bounced back from their disappointing World Cup campaign to record back-to-back victories over Bulgaria andSwitzerland, and are rewarded by rising one place to sixth in the world governing body's latest standings.

The Republic of Ireland also started their qualifying run towards Poland and Ukraine with two wins from their two opening games, and climb six places to 33rd.

Giovanni Trapattoni's team are just six places behind France, who controversially beat them in a World Cup play-off last November. However, Les Bleus' failure to recover from their summer meltdown has seen them plummet to 27th, the lowest ranking in their history.

Northern Ireland's 1-0 win in Slovenia sees Nigel Worthington's side leap 14 places to 45th, two places above Scotland, who drop six notches down the ladder.

Despite losing their opening qualifier in Montenegro - a result which saw John Toshack resign as manager - Wales remain ranked 84th.

Five of the top 10 are from Europe, with four from South America.

Three-times consecutive African champions Egypt are the continent's sole representatives in the top 10, despite failing to qualify for the finals in South Africa.

Albert Bunjaku has been ruled out for six months

Albert Bunjaku's hopes of featuring in Switzerland's next two UEFA EURO 2012 qualifiers have been dashed after the 1. FC Nürnberg striker was ruled out for six months.

The 26-year-old, part of Switzerland's 2010 FIFA World Cup squad, had been complaining of pain in his right knee and although it was initially diagnosed as a torn meniscus, cartilage damage was discovered during surgery in Augsburg on Wednesday. The operation was successful.

"This diagnosis is very sad for Albert and 1. FC Nürnberg," said sporting director Martin Bader. "We wish him all the best and will support him during rehab to the best of our capabilities."

Bunjaku, who scored 12 goals last season to keep his club in the Bundesliga, will be unavailable for Switzerland's Group G qualifiers in Montenegro on 8 October and at home to Wales four days later, as well as friendlies against Ukraine in Geneva on 17 November and in Malta on 9 February. He will aim to return when Switzerland resume their campaign in Bulgaria on 26 March.

Fabio Capello Confirms He Will Quit England After Euro 2012

England manager Capello has confirmed that he plans to stand down and retire from the game altogether after the 2012 European Championships in Poland and the Ukraine.

When asked whether or not he intended to bow out after Euro 2012, the veteran Italian coach (who will turn 66 during the tournament) replied;

“Absolutely. Yes. We have to qualify first of course but after that I will be too old. I want to enjoy my life as a pensioner.”

Capello also admitted that he has plans to immerse himself in his art collection, go on safari with his wife and eventually make the move into football punditry when the time suits. Lovely stuff.

Which leaves us a rather intriguing little dilemma to mull over. Who’s going to be next?

Frank Lampard has done nothing wrong but is still hated by some – just because he is perceived to be middle class

The fallout from Englands's uncharacteristically limber and frisky Euro 2012 qualifying victories has been rousing. Buoyed by the successes of some new faces there has been a call for a culling of senior personnel. John Terry has been fingered as among those most likely to be cast aside like an outdated combine harvester. And Frank Lampard has also attracted his share of finger-jabbing enmity, as he always seems to, a function of the still-vital ambient phenomenon of Lampard-hate. Poor old Frank: a career two-club man who runs hard and scores goals and is polite and articulate and well-groomed but for some reason is still, as has become obvious again this week, widely pigeon-holed as a git.

I have my own theory as to why Lampard has attracted this kind of treatment, right from the swell of inarticulate outrage that surrounded him as teenager at West Ham United. Ancient fault-lines are in play, a scabrous irritation that seems likely to become more prominent as football continues its generational making over and primping up. Lampard, you see, is middle class. Or at least, he is perceived dimly to be middle class: and middle classness is the game's last great taboo, a social grouping that in football circles is employed as a term of unambiguous abuse, as though being middle class is in itself evidence of loyalty-shortfall and backbone-absence and fundamental personality-castration; rather than simply indicating a middling education, an urge to say "thanks cheers" at least four times during any basic retail transaction and the likelihood at least one of your parents is a genial history teacher.

The first thing to say about this is that Lampard isn't really very middle class. He went to public school. He has a GCSE in Latin. But still, I doubt he feels a bracing hair-shirt cultural obligation to listen to Radio 4, or that he has ever dutifully pretended to be really into reggae, or that, confronted by a builder fixing something in his kitchen, he finds himself hanging around engaging in awkward and forced jocularity before eventually retreating wracked with self-immolating embarrassment.

I recently did some research into the issue of middle-class footballers, however, and Lampard is still widely seen as the Premier League's stand-out off. There are other anecdotal candidates. James Milner went to private school; Gareth Barry's children are called Oscar and Freya; and, best of all, Michael Owen lives in a country manor house, which, rather than transforming into a pastiche of the Las-Vegas-Jacobean style, he has restored in meticulous period detail – meticulously restored period detail being the crack cocaine of the middle classes.

This is still an uncomfortable topic. There are those who will be outraged by the mere mention of middle classness in these pages, and plenty who will boisterously assert their own existence beyond its sickly pall. But the moth-eaten armature of the class system is still with us, still lurking horribly like some inherited mahogany dresser. Class is the ancestral skeleton at the heart of football's oldest, and enduring, divide, the 1875 parting of the ways between the public schools and the Football Association. The lines have always been a little blurred: middle-class people have continued to follow football and there have always been undercover middle-class players. Martin Keown, for example, seems unusually discursive and chatty, his punditry style reminiscent of a niggly and obstructive provincial party wall surveyor. I suspect him of concealing a working middle classness behind the public beard of his gorgeously rustic face. Of the current crop Owen Hargreaves is often described as "different" in much the same way theatrical stars of the 1950s who appeared unusually close to their mothers were opaquely bandied about as "confirmed bachelors". Hargreaves, I suspect, has a basic proficiency in an outmoded musical instrument, perhaps the bassoon or the oboe. He may have once attempted to cook paella.

There is a sense of purely sporting frustration attached to all this. It has been said that only the British carve up their sports by class; and that a fully integrated team of, say, Terry Butcher types and David Gower types would be an irrepressible blend of yodelling bone-headed brawn and wafty, eyebrow‑raising inspiration. Other nations, we believe – with their "technique" and their academies and their professors – do not suffer in this way. They integrate. They compliment. They are free to make expansive gestures and talk about books without being afraid that somebody is going to get them in headlock in the showers.

Like most class assumptions, this is no doubt another fallacy – just like the one about Frank Lampard being middle class. He's much too wealthy and too focused for that. If anything his embedded – and also unjustified – unpopularity is based around something new, the confluence in a single footballer of a residue of old-style class-fury with the modern agonies of celebrity-envy and the new monied overclass. It is a heady cocktail. But still, perhaps in the throes of Lampard-fury, football and its increasingly emboldened middle classes might have finally found something they can agree on.

England manager Fabio Capello reportedly wants a month prior to the Euro 2012 championships to ensure that his charges are ready for the tournament.

The Three Lions' boss is under pressure following the failure at the World Cup, which saw his side bow out in a harsh 4-1 defeat to Germany. But it is thought that fatigue played a significant part in the performances put in by the players, as other teams - including Joachim Loew's men - had a four-week break prior to the start of the competition. Now The Mirror claims that the former Real Madrid boss wants to have four weeks to make sure that the European Championship showing does not turn out to be a rerun of the disaster in South Africa. The tournament itself is expected to begin on June 8, with the final of the Champions League reportedly scheduled to take place about 20 days before that. In the meantime, there has also been speculation that the final week of the Premier League as well as the FA Cup final could pose problems for Capello's wish for a month-long break.

Gaffer has not decided if Bellamy will remain as captain...

The 54-year-old was handed the reins to the national team on a temporary basis, after his predecessor John Toshack left by mutual consent following the recent loss to Montenegro.

Flynn, who has previously bossed rising stars such as Gareth Bale, Joe Ledley and Aaron Ramsey, has already indicated his intention to secure the job on a permanent basis. And while in the process of staking a claim to be handed a permanent contract, he insists that age will not be a problem when he considers names to be given a call-up.

"I'll have no worries whatsoever about putting some youngsters in," Flynn told reporters.

"The Under-21s have had a fantastic campaign this year. There are a couple of them pushing for a place and one from the Under-19s who could be a surprise package.

"Maybe a couple from the Under-17s could play too. There could be a few surprises in that squad."

In the meantime, Alan Curtis, Paul Jones and David Williams will assist the manager in his duties for the forthcoming qualifiers, amid calls for Ryan Giggs to be included among the backroom staff as a stepping stone to eventually become boss.

"I know Ryan well because I have coached him since he was 16," Flynn said. "[But] he won't be in the coaching staff for the next two games. I have my coaching staff in place."

As for the ageing veteran making a return to the international arena as a player, he added: "My telephone is always on, my door is always open, age is no barrier to me. Young or old."

Finally, Flynn also conceded that he remains undecided on whether or not striker Craig Bellamy would continue to captain the country.

He said: "It's a bit too early to make a decision on the captaincy. I'll be doing that in due course."

England captain Steven Gerrard was effusive in his praise after England maintained their lead at the top of UEFA EURO 2012 qualifying Group G

England captain Steven Gerrard was effusive in his praise after England maintained their lead at the top of UEFA EURO 2012 qualifying Group G with a 3-1 win against Switzerland in Basel.

Wayne Rooney's first goal for his country in almost a year set the tone for Fabio Capello's side, who rarely looked like relinquishing their lead before further goals from substitutes Adam Johnson and Darren Bent, either side of a brilliant reply from Swiss substitute Xherdan Shaqiri, ensured England opened up an early six-point lead over the team many consider to be their biggest rivals for automatic qualification.

"I think in the first half it was a perfect performance, exactly what the manager asked for," said Gerrard. "In the second half we dropped the tempo slightly and when we were 2-0 up the game should have been over. We let them back in but fortunately we got the third and killed the game."

The Liverpool FC midfielder conceded that the spirit in the camp had suffered as a result of England's disappointing FIFA World Cup campaign but believes the team have gone at least some way to repaying their fans with a solid start to UEFA EURO 2012 qualifying. "I think all the players who were over in South Africa realised it wasn't good enough, so we knew we had to regroup, stick together and try and raise our performance levels. I think over the last two games we've certainly done that."

Switzerland shocked eventual world champions Spain with a defensive, counterattacking display in their World Cup opener, and as such many predicted a frustrating night for England. "They've got a good record, especially at home," Gerrard continued. "Many people were talking about them being hard to score against and hard to beat, but I thought we tore them apart at times."

Gerrard paid particular tribute to team-mate Rooney. "We showed a great togetherness and the early goal for Wayne did him a world of good." The Manchester United FC forward has made a major impact in both his country's qualifiers to date – he created three of England's four goals in Friday's defeat of Bulgaria – and appears to be developing a good understanding with Jermaine Defoe. "Over the two games he's been fantastic for us," said Gerrard.

The defeat leaves Switzerland, reduced to ten men when Stephan Lichtsteiner was dismissed on 65 minutes, playing catch-up in the section – particularly as Montenegro also have maximum points from two outings. Nonetheless, Lichtsteiner believed his red card had little bearing on the final outcome, saying: "I don't think my sending off had anything to do with the defeat. England are just a top-class team. But I have faith in the team. We have a strong squad and can still qualify."