The World Cup used to be such a simple little tournament - bunch of lads, mostly foreigners, playing football, lifting a cup and going home national heroes. Not any more. Now we have the Internet, a wacky little invention that lets people who stay at home a lot, have very few friends and a fondness for nylon clothing communicate with the outside world. And it would seem these people are taking over the cup.

According to France '98's head of technology, Philippe Verveer, the official World Cup Internet site has now attracted more than one billion hits since its launch a year ago, which apparently means that a billion bits of information have been downloaded by fans. Last Friday, the day first-round pool matches ended, interest in the France '98 site at http://www.france98.com surpassed the 56 million hits on one day set at February's Winter Olympics in Japan, said Verveer. In total, some 10 million individual web surfers have browsed the World Cup site from 170 different countries, he said. That is four times as many people as will be able to attend a match throughout the five-week tournament.

Of course, The Irish Times is at the cutting edge of this new Web-surfing lark and has its very own World Cup Internet site with all the latest France '98 news, pictures of all the goalmouth action and expert analysis. Readers can air their views on the competition on the France '98 discussion forum which will run until the end of the tournament. The address is: http:// www.irish-times.com/sports/france98/