Tonight:
4°c
Like the girl in the Tammy Wynette song who gets knocked about and maltreated by her guy but still can't stop herself lovin' him, the followers of England never learn. We just can't help it.
However often the team let us down, all they need do is turn up with a treat every five or six years and all the misery, humiliation and heartbreak is forgiven. This time, we think, it really is going be different.
It was quite a treat they served up in Zagreb on Wednesday, so here we are today grinning like idiots and thinking of England glories to come.
This is the way of it with football, love Country and Western style. It's heaven or hell (usually hell), with no grey areas, no shade or nuance.
The side is either a national disgrace packed with posturing ponces whose lack of pride degrades the shirt (Wednesday, 7.59pm); or it's a godly synthesis of heroic individuals whose unencumbered path to the World Cup is strewn with rose petals (Wednesday, 9.55pm).
The pendulum swings so fast you can't see it moving, and never rests b e twe en the two extremes where in fact it belongs.
So, although I snorted half a pint through my nostrils when I heard the statement, it shouldn't have been a shock, three minutes after the final whistle, to hear some chap on Setanta declaring that from this launch pad England could win the 2010 World Cup. Bless him.
The truth about the defeat of Croatia, stirring and startling though it was, is that it tells us little new about our World Cup prospects other than that England will be there in. Beyond the mathematical near certainty of qualification, next to nothing can be deduced that we didn't know before about the team.
Everyone knew that as greedy a snaffler of Scudetti as Fabio Capello had the nous and nerve for big games, and no one questioned Theo Walcott's turn of foot.
Harder to recall, but worth doing if only as insurance against the pain to come, is that every now and then England have a night from heaven when every chance goes in and superior opposition goes missing, and then they fill their boots.
In Euro 96, England played beautifully against the dismal, couldn't-care-less Dutch and won 4-1, but a few days later they were atrocious against Spain.
In 2001, they counter-attacked superbly in annihilating Germany 5-1 in Munich, but the following summer it was England who lost spinelessly in the World Cup quarter-finals and Germany who reached the final.
Perhaps this time it will be different. Perhaps all the encouragements - the precocious calm of Walcott in front of goal, the return to international form of Wayne Rooney, Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard, the solidity in central defence - will prove genuine oases and not f leet ing mirages. Please God, they do.
Even so, one win, however thrilling, hardly establishes England as "the best side in Europe", as Slaven Bilic anointed us, more to downgrade the severity of Croatia's defeat, you felt, than through sober analysis of the evidence.
Unquestionably this was a stride in the right direction for England.
But a single stride is all it was and it will take several more before we can begin to tell whether this was the start of a genuine renaissance or another cruel false dawn.
In the meantime, if only because of the memory of nights like Wednesday when for once it treats us right, we will do what we always do, usually with gritted teeth and rolling pin in hand, and stand by our team.
Federer's return to form makes up for Andy
Never has a major British sporting defeat been as painless as the one suffered by Andy Murray in New York.
Eighteen years on, I haven't even begun to recover from the World Cup '90 semi final defeat in Turin (at least that's what my £150 an hour psychoanalyst keeps telling me), while Tim Henman's Wimbledon loss to Goran Ivanisevic in 2001 and several of Nick Faldo's near misses are as raw today as they were at the time.
With Murray, there was no pain at all. This is partly because it wasn't a near miss, but mostly because it is impossible not to be delighted by roger Federer's return to peak form.
Apart from a brief wobble in the second set, the Fed was flawless enough to make dunces of we who thought he was irreversibly on the slide.
Admittedly, a palpably fatigued Murray's failure to serve as powerfully and accurately as against Rafael Nadal made it easy, but the brilliance of his own serving and the fluency of his ground strokes would have overwhelmed anyone but Nadal, and on that surface possibly him too.
If this was a pivotal tournament in Murray's career, so it was also for the Fed.
He began it exhibiting signs of a middle-aged breakdown victim struggling to cope with decline, all fractious and gesturing to himself like a drunk in a public park.
He ended it with his serenity fully restored and although it was at Murray's expense, this was one revival no one could begrudge.
West Ham's too big a task for little Zola
There's a very minor symmetry about Gianfranco Zola's appointment as West Ham manager. It was his nutmegging of a terrifying Hammers hard man that provoked my all time favourite football chant, the bowdlerized version of which goes: "If you think we're taking the mick/ Just ask that chap Julian Dicks/ About Zola/ Zo-Zo-Zo-Zo Zooola ..." to the tune of The Kinks' song.
The question now is whether the sardinian can transpose the genius that drew this lyrical wit from the choristers of Chelsea to a hideous-looking job at a perennially unstable club.
The odds are not good. Great players seldom make great managers, and great players with adorably sweet natures even less frequently.
I hope he proves me wrong, but you can't help feeling that what may be required in this challenging post, so far as temperament goes, is a little less of Zola and a little more Dicks.
Burnham in need of a sporting chance
The political titan with ultimate responsibility for sport busies himself with the populist agenda of the moment.
There is no finer bandwagon this week than the growing disconnection between fans and football clubs, hence the vision of the Culture, Media and Sport Secretary Andy Burnham leaping aboard.
In interviews, Andy advances such ideas as a quota system for foreign players and even supporter ownership along German and Spanish lines.
This is all admirable stuff, but his job is not to witter on about utopian ideals. That's the job of feckless idiots like me.
Andy's job, technically speaking, is making things happen, in this case by forcing the Football Association and Premier League to act in the game's interest rather than their own.
They will fight like alley cats to resist this, and whether Andy has the will and courage to compel them I rather doubt. He has 21 months before Labour leaves office to show us his guts.
