England's Dream Ticket follows England from the ignominious Wembley defeat at the hands of Germany to the last-gasp Beckham-bender at Old Trafford against Greece. Highlights of all the matches, including friendlies against Spain, Mexico and Holland are interspersed with episodes on Sven and Wembley, and capture a sense of the media-frenzy that follows the team. Germany 1 England 5 charts that glorious September 2001 evening, offering the full BBC (Motson, Brooking) coverage of the match. Finally, The England Collection is an entertaining though somewhat flawed hall-of-fame, featuring 50 players who have graced the England team (three keepers, 13 defenders, 18 midfielders, 16 strikers). Some of the selections and omissions are hard to understand, and there is a distinct bias towards the post-1980s, presumably because of lack of rights to footage. Extra sections on 30 best goals, the Next Generation and Bloopers, are fun but still missing valuable players.

On the DVD: England’s World Cup Magic contains lots of extras spread across the three discs, including scene selection; exclusive interviews with Sven and his assistant Tord Grip; England U21 match highlights; text-only match statistics and player profiles; montages of top 10 qualification goals. The England Collection is essentially a file of nearly 100 programmes of around 60 seconds each and is poorly served by the technology--viewers have no option but to trawl through the bulk of the clips one at a time. --Alex Hankin

Special Features
English
Region 2


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