The Sydney Morning Herald from Sydney, New South Wales, Australia • Page 189

piay; Jason Keith, i r. who surfs World Cup sites. Get the score or the stats on demand, chat to supporters or enemies across the globe. Sports online is going head to head to compete with TV and radio. Keith Austin and Charlotte Harper report.

Monday morning syndrome, when you come into work and catch up with goals you missed at the weekend. The secret, in my opinion, is a comprehensive and up-to-the-minute news sports offering that gives you all the background that TV and radio can't give you, when you want it." Like most other World Cup soccer sites, the Beeb provides news, analysis and in-depth backgrounders on every team and their star players. Where else could you discover that the Jamaican team the Reggae Boyz are being swept along on a "wave of Jamaican football Or that 21 -year-old Ronaldo, supposedly the best player in the world, has twice won FTFA's best player of the Year award and cost Inter Milan a world record 18 million ($47 2 million) at the start of the 1997-98 season. ET3 HE 1998 World Cup, which kicks off in i I four days, is without doubt the biggest 1 single sporting event in the history of. Li mankind.

For 33 days, up to 37 billion people will watch 32 nations kick a soccer ball around various grass rectangles in France. There are superlatives galore about this quadrennial event, but the most striking difference between this and the previous 15 World Cups (going back to 1930) is its presence on the Web. In 1994, you would have been hard-pressed to find a site dedicated to soccer, but as Greg Hadfield, a former Fleet Street journalist and now editor of Soccernet (www.soccernetcom), says: "You can't turn around on the Web these days without bumping into a soccer site." But from his home and office in Brighton, (I A 7 Wfri There's even a video clip of him in action and audio endorsement of his skills from the great Pele. There's a spot-the-ball competition and even a goal-kicking cartoon game that tests and improves your French. One of the best is the official France 98 site (www.france98.com) where you can discover why the World England, he cautions: "The trouble is, so many sites try to get too clever with the graphics at the expense of the content" That said, when you consider the fact that many former players are hobbling around Britain on sticks after ruining their knees playing soccer, perhaps it's a good thing that the pain and the 65 It allows fans to replay match action again and again.

99 Hadfield says the increasing attraction for sports Web sites was "global interest, instantaneous updates and lots of advertisers wanting to target the huge Australians Jason Keith and Greg Baxter surf the World Cup sites regularly. They both recommend Fifa's official site (www.fifa.com), France 98 and World Cup France 98 (www. wldcup.com). Keith, 24, who works at IBM in Sydney, says: "The main attraction is instant access to information. I can go to the Internet the morning after a game and get access to results and game highlights.

Even the most basic sites such as Yahoo Sports (www.yahoo.com) contain updated information about major matches." Keith says one of the most impressive "sports-related" sites was the Winter Olympics site (www. nagano.oJympic.on) which reached 98,226 hits per minute. "This is an important issue that the World Cup soccer sites will need to deal with. The World Cup is supposedly the world's most watched single sporting event so we can expect to see a It is listed on the world's Top 100 Sports Sites (www.lOOhotcomsportsindexxnuTil) at No 2. But though Soccemet's Hadfield now talks the Web talk, it was only in spring 1995 that his eyes were opened to the Internet by his son, Tom.

"He explained the future to me," says Hadfield, who had never used the Net in his life. "The future" was simply a site which brought all the football scores and match reports to fans around the world as soon as the final whistle blew. Today, Soccernet is continually updated and is advancing towards 100,000 users a day. During big events, it has peaked at 800,000 hits in one day. "By the time we get to June 10, we are hoping to introduce animated action replays running a television image through software that converts it into a graphic representation of the game.

It's the next best thing to television, and allows fans to replay match action again and again." Soccemet's publishing partner, SportsLine (www.sportsline.com is building a team of 20-plus for the World Cup with backup from its usual 200-strong workforce. Cup mascot, a blue cockerel called Footix, was almost lumbered with a name such as Houpi, Raffy, Gallik or Zimbo. And no, it wasn't because Footix sounds like a treatment for tinea. The booby prize for presentation, though, has to go to the Tifo-Net France 98 page (www. tifonetitsoccer) with its bright green soccer pitch background overlaid with the jazziest concoction of clashing colours this side of a migraine.

Probably the most widely known, dedicated soccer site in the world is Soccernet, which provides news and analysis of games in the English and Scottish leagues as well as World Cup pages, a soccer store, newsletter, spot the ball and indexes in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, The Netherlands, Spain and Uruguay. passion can now be experienced vicariously over the Web because about the only things you can hurt online are your eyes and your syntax. For instance, at BBC Online (www.bbc.co.uk), Des Lynam, the British equivalent of SBS soccer pundit Les Murray, says that "football fever is here and we're in gear for France The BBC World Cup site boasts that it will provide the "lowdown" on the various groups as well as cover the games. Tom Loosemore, a senior producer on the site, says: "At the moment he site is updated once an hour and we have roughly 10-20 staff. When the cup is on, it'll be up-to-the minute.

"On the Web, the live is much less important than the nearly live the real value is the 4 icon SMH JUNE 6, 1998.