Many decades ago, I was extremely fortunate to sit at a dinner next to Walter Winterbottom, a past England Football manager, Sir Alf Ramsey’s predecessor. Of course, we talked about football and England’s future prospects.

He gave me a very simple rule to predict the next winning team. The winning team will have the nucleus from a single football club where the players know instinctly the actions of their fellow team-mates. This saves them fractions of seconds in their actions and gives the team the winning touch.

For example

The 1966 winners, the England team was built around Moore, Peters and Hurst who were members of West Ham United.
The 1970 winners, the Brazil Team was built around Pele and members of the Santos Football club

He said that as players now played in many different clubs and countries, it was more difficult to find this combination but when it happens, you will know the winner.

The current Germany Football team, is built around Bayern Munich players – Schweinsteiger, Lahm, Muller, Gomez and Klose.

They have defeated England 4-1 and Argentina 4-0 – these are remarkable performances in itself.

Using this criteria, I going to stick my neck out and going predict, Germany will win the 2010 World Cup.

Mind you, I have not looked that the compositions of the other teams but, they have not been impressive or cohesive as a team.

Dr Michael Oon