'WELL, speechless I suppose you can't be as a commentator, but I've never more felt like that,' said John Motson. His world had turned upside down, and so had his syntax. We needed a flying start - and we'd got one. Unfortunately San Marino were in the cockpit. 'Oh, a mistake by Pearce. And San Marino. I don't believe this. Ex-straw-din-ary start. Galtieri the little No 11. Ten seconds. Goodness me. Trevor Brooking, what can you say?' Trev too was struck dumb, but he knew his country was counting on him: 'I gotta say something - all right, it means we need eight goals.'

CONGRATULATIONS to England's travelling supporters for their astonishingly pacey performance in the pre-match national anthem last Wednesday night (Sportsnight Special, BBC 1). I clocked them in at 13.67 seconds, from start to finish - an all-time lap record which left the local military band struggling to come home in second place some four minutes later. The anthem ended up sounding like a track off The Pogues Play Your Favourite Pub Classics, Volume IV, but this is the only way to operate on the international scene. The lads had a job to do - they got in there and they did it.

GRAHAM TAYLOR was in defiant mood after the match in Bologna, refusing to be drawn on whether he would be resigning as England manager. 'I'm a football man and I'm pretty confident I'll be one until the day I die,' he said. 'The whole thing, the speculation that's going on, is perfectly understandable when the results are not there.

HE HAD been walking in the grounds with his personal PR man and came in with the Martin Luther King routine: 'I have a dream'. Unfortunately, Graham Taylor bears closer resemblance to poor old Luther Blissett, the scattergun striker they used to call 'Miss-it', and England need not so much a dream as a full-blown miracle if they are to get to the World Cup now.

HE tried to make the squad sound interesting, but it was mostly the same old faces, and there was more interest in what Graham Taylor would be doing in nine days' time than what England might accomplish against San Marino in eight.

ENGLISH football has had a wake or two these past few weeks, and the atmosphere is unlikely to rise much above the funereal on Monday, when Graham Taylor rakes over the ashes of a spent World Cup campaign to produce his last squad as manager of the national team.

WHEN two laywers, Giuseppe Giampaolo and Paolo Trombetti, stand up in a Bologna courtroom tomorrow, they will be hoping to lay to rest one of the ghosts of Italy's dark political past.

MUCH HAS been made in recent years - especially in the light of last year's lamentable 'Derrida Affair' at Cambridge - of the gulf between 'Anglo-American' and 'Continental' philosophy. Some zealots on this side of the channel would have us believe that this gulf is unbridgeable. But why? What, exactly, is supposed to be the irreconcilable difference between the two traditions? And what do the terms 'Anglo-American' and 'Continental' mean in this context?

FIVE DAYS after the car bombings of Milan and Rome the city of Bologna yesterday commemorated its own dead - the 85 victims of the bomb that destroyed the city's railway station on 2 August 1980.

THERE IS in most travellers a strain of perverse elitism. When any two paths diverge, the true traveller - along with Robert Frost - takes the one less travelled . . . and then boasts about it afterwards. It has become a cardinal rule of 'travelmanship' to prefer always the least regarded half of any recognisable pair; to admire Glasgow above Edinburgh, the Gobi Desert above Salisbury Plain.

THE Prince of Wales visits Bologna this month to open an exhibition inspired by his Vision of Britain book, television programme and exhibition held at the Victoria and Albert Museum. But in 'A Vision of Europe' the Prince demonstrates that the Classical architecture he advocates is not merely a parochial British concern. The list of exhibitors includes some of his favourite architects. The Prince's attack on the British architectural establishment in A Vision of Britain has made the exhibition's advisers nervous about releasing the text of his forward to the Bologna catalogue. Brian Hanson, director of the Prince of Wales's Institute of Architecture, says the exhibition is 'intended to be a very positive showing of schemes being built across Europe'. 'A Vision of Europe' opens in the church of San Giorgio, Poggiale, Bologna on 29 September.

Four hundred pages of text, with a 100-page introduction: the compilation, editing and translation of this first volume of Pasolini's Letters must have been a gigantic task. Whatever interest an English-speaking reader may have in Pasolini as a film-maker or novelist lies largely beyond the scope of the book: running from 1940 to 1954, the letters end before the publication of Ragazzi di Vita and well before Pasolini began to take a serious interest in cinema. Their author is a young poet, writing mainly in the northern dialect of Friuli, whose verse is illustrated only by the few examples he chose to send to his friends.