HOW might a selection of prominent people respond to the news of the appointment of Sven-Goran Eriksson as coach of the England football team?

TONY BLAIR: Hi! I'm a sort of modern guy, y'know. Now look, uh? I mean the old days - they've gone. The bad old days when English football was, y'know, run by the forces of conservatism. They're gone. I mean, y'know, well, hey, now I I mean, we, I mean he can really get on with the modernisation of Team England.

GREG DYKE: The trouble with the English football team is that it's hideously English.

CILLA BLACK: It's reelly, reelly luvly. Ony, he's costing a lorra lorra dosh loike. I ony hewpe it all werks. Lerrim have a luvly honeymoon with the team and a few away matches, and come back and tell us what it were loike.

FERGAL KEANE: I can remember exactly what I was doing when I heard the news. I had the drawer of old photographs spread all over the sitting room carpet and I was just sitting among them sobbing gently to myself. The radio announcer said: "Sven-Goran Eriksson has been appointed England team manager". I burst into floods of tears at once and cried my eyes out all afternoon - even more than I cried in those nostalgic days when Kevin Keegan was manager.

WILLIAM HAGUE: Well, Mr Blair can call him what he likes. But if he looks like a manager, talks like a manager and gets paid like a manager - then by golly he is a manager. Under Mr Blair - I mean Kevin Keegan - all we had were broken promises. Now I'm looking for a commonsense revolution throughout football.

MELVYN BRAGG: Football, on reflection, isn't just a game. Perhaps it isn't even a game. Our post-modern discipline of sociolinguistics perhaps identifies it as a potent atavistic drive residing in the depths of the unconscious - a powerful hierarchy of symbols mediated by numinous metonymic and synechdocal expressions in which the national psyche is sublimated into what psychologists call "play". (By the way, anyone want to make an offer for £14m shares in ITV?)

JOHN PRESCOTT: It's balls. Long balls, short balls, running on to balls when I was a lad the through-ball proper socialism. Foreigners aren't English. Residing here like what they treat them all across the north sea fishing integrated transport scheme won't to the bloody grounds get them. Tory lies sick of now we'll (or not) perhaps see team spirit how far you can get.

THE ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY: This is an enormously meaningful development in a very real sense. You know, some people tell me they don't have faith in the manager, that they've given up on him. But this is a counsel of despair and the cause of so many of society's problems in this day and age. What we have to do now is put all our trust in him, then when the defeats come along, not regard them as defeats at all but victories.

DR ANTHONY CLARE: Psychiatry tells us that if you head a ball too much, you go soft in the brain. But as a psychiatrist and a very well-paid talking head myself, I want to ask what it is that, in Freudian terms, "kick starts" the sort of people we call "footballers". Consider the ball itself. Is it, as Jung would see it, a mandala, an archetypal symbol of the integrated footballing personality? Or, according to the cognitive psychologists, an entirely pragmatic transfunctional device for securing the connection between ostensibly pointless running about on a field and receiving huge sums of money? We all feel guilty, myself included, when we receive loads of money. That's why (as psychiatrists explain) we refer to money by dirty words: "filthy lucre", "made his pile", "rolling in it" and so on.

ANN ROBINSON: Right, come off it then. Why did you think Kevin Keegan should be the one to go? You didn't? You say Kevin Keegan voted himself as the weakest link? What a wimp! But then you're all wimps, aren't you. You've won nothing, but like me you've banked plenty. OK Sven, at the moment you're the strongest link. It's your turn, but you fluff it and I'll take my whip to you.