Argentina have parted company with their coach, Alfio Basile, completing the 64-year-old’s second stint in charge of the South American giants.

Argentina are continuing to stutter in the South American World Cup qualifying league. They finally ended a run of one defeat and four draws last Saturday with a hard-fought 2-1 win over Uruguay in Buenos Aires, in which Lionel Messi and Sergio Agüero both found form and a place on the scoresheet. They reverted to bad form, though, on Wednesday night, losing 1-0 in Chile. Basile’s anagram-nemesis Marcelo Bielsa fielded a team set up to capitalize on Argentina’s physical weaknesses, with energetic young forward Fabián Orellana scoring his first international goal to take Chile level on points with Argentina.

At their best, Argentina play the best attacking football in the world, but it is becoming increasingly rare that they do so. But is it really Basile’s fault that the Argentine league continues to produce diminutive players who, whatever their immense technical ability, constantly get outfought against South American and European opponents?

Argentina were the best team, by a mile, in last year’s Copa América until they met an inconsistent but resolute Brazil in the Final. Lionel Messi, Juan Román Riquelme, Carlos Tévez and friends could ping the ball about at will against teams like Peru and Mexico but such what the athleticism of the Brazilians that they simply couldn’t help being overpowered. Despite inconsistent form during the tournament - they lost their first match 2-0 to Mexico - Brazil won at a canter, 3-0.

That tournament was Hernán Crespo’s last real involvement with the international side. Diego Milito, then at Real Zaragoza and now back at Genoa, was thought to be his natural successor but Basile preferred a trio of smaller, more intricate forwards; Lionel Messi from the right, Sergio Agüero in the middle and Carlos Tévez from the left. Basile is inclined towards an idealistic approach; he wanted beautiful football but could not provide results.

He was not helped, either, by a dirth of defensive talent. Like Crespo, Roberto Ayala retired from international football after the Copa América and he has not been replaced. Racing Santander defender Ezequiel Garay is seen as a long-term prospect but Basile did not appear to trust him in competitive internationals. Nor do they have an obvious first-choice left-back; Juan Pablo Sorín another veteran who has not yet been convincingly replaced.

These individual issues may be solved in time but the main problems will not go away merely by replacing Basile. Argentina lack physical strength and still lose their discipline too often. Carlos Tévez doesn’t seem able to be relied upon not to get sent off and was booked again against Uruguay; left-winger Ángel di María, scorer of the goal in the Olympic Final, may displace him in time. But where is the next Crespo, the next Ayala and the next Sorín? Flowers don’t bloom without soil.

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Chelsea’s trip to Middlesbrough on Saturday lunchtime was as uncompetitive a contest as I’ve ever seen in the Premier League, it was grotesque. Chelsea, who looked like they could score at will, might be really quite good if they get their £100m worth of absent talent back to fitness but do players like Juliano Belletti and Salomon Kalou, who have excelled in the absence of their injured stars, deserve to be summarily relegated to the bench once Michal Ballack, Joe Cole and co return?

Belletti is a particularly interesting case; he was signed as an alternative to Paulo Ferreira at right-back but didn’t appear to be much cop in that position. He has been reinvented by Scolari, out of necessity, as a box-to-box midfielder, scoring twice already this season, matching his tally for the whole of the last campaign. He is strong and quick with a lethal long-range shot, as Wigan, Tottenham and Middlesbrough have found to their cost in the last twelve months so it might be an idea if Roma try to close him down rather more keenly that the Boro defence were he to find himself in possession thirty-odd yards from goal on Wednesday evening.

Roma, by the way, have been nicely softened up for Chelsea by their former boss José Mourinho and his charges at Internazionale, who eased to a 4-0 win in Rome last night that reduced the home club’s president Rosella Sensi to tears.

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Another game, another win over London opposition for Hull City, who have made the Housemartins’ 1986 début album title London 0 Hull 4 come true, but the biggest miracle is how the club have made football now the biggest crowd-puller in a hitherto rugby league dominated city. Hull FC do not attract capacity crowds to the KC Stadium except for the occasional derby fixture against Hull Kingston Rovers, who play at the Craven Park ground in East Hull.

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Is it just me, or is Dirk Kuyt actually quite good when played in his proper position, centre forward, as opposed to being stuck out on the right flank? He did well for the Netherlands in Euro 2008 because they played with such tactical flexibility that allowed Kuyt to come inside and work with other players such as Wesley Sneijder, whom he set up to score the second goal in the 3-0 thrashing of world champions Italy. He looks like a lost soul when having to patrol the right touchline but his finishing has been clinical so far this season when allowed to come into the box and get on the end of crosses.

Jermaine Pennant also played well against Wigan Athletic on Saturday and contributed to Kuyt’s new-found form; he might not be the best right-winger in England but he is certainly the best right-winger at Liverpool. The team always look better when he plays.

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I wrote, a few months ago, about an international friendly between France and Algeria at the Stade de France in 2001 that ended with a pitch invasion and national hand-wringing at the behaviour of the young, poor immigrants so often bullied and used as scapegoats by the odious president Chirac. On Tuesday night, France played Tunisia at the Stade de France and, predictably, the home anthem was once again loudly booed by some Tunisian supporters, most of whom were French-domiciled immigrants or their descendants.

Equally predictable was the knee-jerk reaction of president Sarkozy, him with the simplistic, reactionary anti-immigration stance and the Hungarian surname. Any match before which La Marseillaise is booed must not be played, he instructed Jean-Pierre Escalettes, the head of the FFF, France’s FA. The players must be frog-marched off the pitch and the stands emptied.

The Algeria debacle came just weeks after the 9/11 attacks and, taken on its own, might be seen merely as a bad event in bad times but racial tensions still cast a long shadow over football in France. Whatever, Sarkozy’s new hard-line stance is idiotic and doomed to failure. How does he suppose the stewards at the Stade de France should ask 80,000 fans to leave quietly were the anthem to be booed by supporters of, say, Romania, in a key World Cup qualifier? Does he imagine FIFA would acquiesce? Does he think what French football needs right now is another excuse to heighten interracial or international tension on the terraces?

National anthems are often booed, not least in England, but the problem is escalated in France because insulting a national symbol is a crime, punishable by six months in jail or a fine of €7,500. This turns what, in England, would merely constitute a rude and ignorant act into a political gesture of anti-establishment sentiments, feeding off the false bravado that being an anonymous figure in a large crowd causes. France play Uruguay on 19 November, in Paris. Do not be surprised if a few hundred French fans try to call Sarkozy’s bluff.

Mind you, political posturing around behaviour at football matches is nothing new in France. Before the 2002 Coupe de France final between two also-ran clubs Lorient and Bastia, Corsica’s main club. After the anthem was booed by the Corsican supporters, Chirac stopped proceedings and ordered Bastia’s officials to publicly apologize to the 80,000-strong crowd. He then blundered through a pompous, self-important press-conference on the state of French politics before finally allowing the match to go ahead. By that time, primed players had gone stale and a farcical final saw Bastia lost 1-0 to the team who had finished the season bottom of Ligue 1, sealing Chirac’s unpopularity in northern Corsica.

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One Thursday evening last season, I watched in astonishment as Peter Drury, ITV’s football commentator, announced during Tottenham Hotspur’s UEFA Cup match against Getafe that Martin Jol had been sacked, surely the most ineptly-managed severing of an employee’s ties in recent football history. Tottenham remain bottom after eight matches with fewer points than a vegetable samosa.

The amiable and capable Jol, meanwhile, now manages Hamburg, whose 1-1 draw with Schalke took them back to the top of the Bundesliga yesterday. Jol must be looking at Tottenham’s plight and be wondering what the German for schadenfreude is.

Meanwhile, on what grounds was Michael Dawson protesting his red card towards the end of the interminable injury time at the Britannia Stadium? Did he think that, because he didn’t actually snap Mamady Sidibe’s leg in two, he should be let off?