Off you go, George - one has a game to watch

LONDON - The Queen will get rid of her house guest just in time to join most of England in watching the final from Sydney.

President George W. Bush vacates his room at Buckingham Palace today, leaving the Queen in peace to cheer, apparently, for both sides when England play Australia at Telstra Stadium in Sydney.

"She is the Queen of England and the Queen of Australia, so she wouldn't be biased," a palace spokeswoman said.

Unlike her grandson, Prince Harry, who has been to several World Cup games proudly wearing his England shirt and waving the St George Cross, which even sported a cheerio to "Dad and Willy" at last week's semifinal win over France.

While Harry will be among up to 30,000 English supporters at the final, hundreds of thousands back home will pack pubs and at least 13 million are expected to watch the game on television in their lounges.

More than 15,000 pubs and 1000 rugby clubs have applied for licences to allow them to serve alcohol for breakfast, and an extra seven million pints of beer are expected to be poured, generating additional sales worth £14 million ($37.3 million).

But not all the pubs will be full of English supporters.

The Australian-theme Walkabout bar in Shepherds Bush in West London is opening at 8am and expects to reach its capacity crowd of 1150 by 8.30am, half-an-hour before kickoff, as it did for last weekend's semifinal against New Zealand.

English supporters are "officially" welcome, but assistant manager Stuart Auchterlonie said they would be mad to want to be at any of the 47 Walkabouts in England.

"We want the place to be full of Aussies," Auchterlonie said.

The rugby hasn't matched the hype of last year's soccer World Cup, but at least it's knocked the round-ball game off the back pages of England's tabloid newspapers for a few days.

Vicars last year wrote hymns for David Beckham and the English team, and even postponed Sunday services.

No church has gone that far for the rugby, but the Catholic Stonyhurst College in Lancashire broke four centuries of tradition and let its pupils miss Mass to watch the semifinal against France last Sunday.

The Jesuit school has produced 22 saints and martyrs, but has three more important old boys this weekend - England players Will Greenwood, Kyran Bracken and Iain Balshaw.

It will break new ground again tomorrow when it lets students off morning lessons to watch the final.

A win will boost a country which has longed for major international sporting success since the 1966 soccer World Cup. But a loss won't be too damaging to a nation hardened by years of failure.

"Parallels will be drawn with 1966 and people will say, 'Here we go, we're on top of the world again'," psychologist Ian Cockerill said.

"But if England lose on Saturday, the negatives will not be as great as the positives if they won.

"The esteem of the nation will be enhanced if we win, but I don't think the country will go into mourning if they lose, because they've lost a few things anyway. Not that we like to lose or get used to losing."

- REUTERS

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