The Football Association has confirmed the matter has been referred to its video panel.Middlesbrough, who are likely to be rebuffed in their efforts to sign Geremi from Real Madrid, are setting up a £3m deal for the Ghanaian midfielder Derek Boateng, who plays for Panathinaikos.The Blackburn Rovers manager Graeme Souness wants Millwall’s Republic of Ireland winger Stephen Reid in a £2m summer move to replace the out-of-contract Keith Gillespie.Portsmouth are in talks with the Croatian World Cup goalkeeper Stipe Petikosa – also linked with Manchester City and Birmingham City – about a £2m move from Croatia Zagreb.Sam Allardyce has gone to watch the Egyptian Ibrahim Said as he plans for next season. The Bolton manager flew to watch Said, who has just left Everton after an extended loan spell, when his country took on France in Paris on Wednesday. Allardyce is also ready to sign the striker Jay Bothroyd from Coventry in a bargain deal. The former Arsenal prospect is going to train with Bolton and play for them in a trial match next week.. It equals 0.1 per cent of his estimated wealth but the £4,500 fine levied on Sir Alex Ferguson by Uefa may halt the Manchester United manager’s propensity to cast aspersions on foreign football.

The Spanish and Italian teams don’t play each other; how do you think they worked that out? They don’t want us in the final, that’s for sure.”Uefa were angered by the comments and the head of the Austrian FA, Friedrich Stickler, who made the draw was especially incensed. “The whole draw is open and fair, and that makes his words even more ridiculous and unprofessional,” Stickler retorted.This is not the first time Ferguson’s tongue has fallen foul of Uefa. He was fined £2,000 following comments made before United’s successful European Cup quarter-final with Internazionale in 1999. Told that Ronaldo would be missing from their line-up, Ferguson retorted: “When an Italian tells me it’s pasta on the plate, I check under the sauce to make sure it really is.” Before United took the field at San Siro, he predicted Inter would be “scheming, diving, referee baiting – the full repertoire.”Two years ago he branded the Dutch nation “arrogant” before a fixture with PSV Eindhoven, but escaped without censure.Ferguson refused to comment on Uefa’s fine at a forum of North-west managers arranged to promote better relations with the media. Midway through the event, four newspapers, as well as various radio stations and the country’s major news agency, the Press Association, were told they would not be welcome at United’s training headquarters today for the club’s weekly press conference.

Ferguson was upset they had ridiculed an outburst of his when asked questions about David Beckham.The United manager will be more worried that Gary Neville will miss the final two matches of the season and may be in doubt for the club’s lucrative tour of the United States.Neville, who has not started a match since United’s 4-0 demolition of Liverpool, which triggered the club’s dash to the summit of the Premiership, will also be unavailable for England’s Euro 2004 qualifier with Slovakia after having surgery to remove a screw fitted into his foot after an injury suffered in last year’s European Cup semi-final between United and Bayer Leverkusen.. It is probably not possible to put a price on a proper response to the fetid combination of racism and pitch invasion which made Sunderland’s Stadium of Light such an unsavoury, and unsafe, place when England beat Turkey there a month ago. It said, yet again, that football is bereft of any standards let alone a universal one. The most bizarre, but apparently successful, strand of the FA argument was that the previous good behaviour of English fans at home should be given strong consideration.For anyone who shared the boulevards of Rome and Marseilles, Charleroi and Brussels with a “minority” of misbehaving England fans it was breath-taking sophistry – a bit like saying that when Visigoths came home on leave they were suddenly little rays of sunshine.This wasn’t, of course, the case in Sunderland when England supporters – led by a large contingent of vendetta-fuelled Leeds fans – booed the Turkish national anthem, indulged in relentless racism – and invaded the pitch. Without wishing to exacerbate the already pressing financial problems facing the FA, there is certainly cause for regret that the Slovakia match will not serve as an eerie warning of where the mindlessness might end.It would have said, after all these years of Clockwork Orange, that finally a point of zero tolerance had been reached. No doubt the loss of £2m would have concentrated FA minds on the dawning problem of pitch invasion – and maybe even David Beckham’s.The England captain is on the record as saying he would have favoured closed doors at the Riverside because he had come to wonder if a big international game was where he would want his wife and children to be.

It was a position that would have carried more weight had he not himself behaved so irresponsibly at the Stadium of Light. Apart from a wildly emotional and erratic performance, which earned an early yellow card, he offered his usual photo opportunity by rushing towards a crowd which had already displayed its fancy for a bit of pitch invasion. Such was the quality of England’s leadership on the field on a critical night.The FA offer not to claim its ticket allocation for the autumn match in Istanbul was widely, and no doubt correctly, seen in part as a negotiating ploy in yesterday’s effort to save the Middlesbrough gate, but whatever its motivation it was to be welcomed. It was an act of simple common sense when set against the history of Anglo-Turkish football relations.Another benefit in the aftermath of Sunderland was the putting aside of one of the most pervasive myths surrounding English football hooliganism. It was the assertion that only a minority go abroad looking for trouble wherever they can find it.