When I use the word column, in many cases they were "ghosted" columns - that is to say one of our journalists conducts an interview and then writes up what was said into an article.

We always made it clear this was the case, with the "ghost" journalist receiving a credit at the foot of the piece. And all of the footballer's words were original, just perhaps arranged in a slightly different way so they made more sense.

That didn't always meet with your approval, so it was why we launched our first blog written by a real-life footballer!

The main football columnists have been James Beattie, Neil Warnock (my personal favourite), Jason Roberts, Kevin Nolan, Owen Hargreaves, Micah Richards and Ian Holloway.

While we had many positive comments from readers, we also received feedback from quite a lot of you requesting more genuine insight and more personal reflection from such columns.

We listened and have now gone down a totally different avenue by finding our own football blogger.

How did we do it? Well, via former Sheffield Wednesday defender Lawrie Madden who runs a sports journalism course at Staffordshire University. He's the senior lecturer at the university and helped me find a budding blogger who not only plays professional football but is also considering a future career in the media when he hangs up his boots.

And so we arrived at Gavin Strachan.

Gavin plays for Notts County in League Two. He's been out injured for a while, but came on at Exeter City on Saturday for the closing stages of the game.

He played a full 90 minutes in a behind-closed doors friendly against Nottingham Forest on Tuesday and is now fit and raring to go.

I met Gavin recently and it quickly became apparent that he's genuinely excited about all of this. He's dead keen and admits he's a novice, a trainee writer I suppose - but he couldn't wait to get started.

I'm sure he'd be grateful for feedback from you and as the weeks clock by, I am confident that his blogs will give help us all gain a much greater understanding of exactly what's it like to be a footballer.

Not a big-time Charlie. Just a down-to-earth footballer who is proud of his job and who simply loves playing.

Enjoy...

That was Switzerland’s way of launching the countdown to Euro 2008 which it is jointly staging next summer with neighbours Austria.

Original definitely, if not a little dangerous for the 400-odd people invited to watch the event who had to risk their limbs sliding around on the snow at the top of the Jungfrau.

There were even plenty of stars on show for the five-a-side game, including Michael Laudrup (104 caps for Denmark), Arsenal’s charming Swiss youngster Johan Djourou and Portugal legend Paulo Sousa.

Not forgetting the national coaches of both host countries, Kobi Kuhn and Josef Hickersberger, and captains and Euro 2008 ambassadors Stephane Chapuisat (103 caps for Switzerland) and Andreas Herzog (103 caps for Austria).

I couldn’t help but sense a little naivety amid all the thigh-slapping and regalia of the Swiss hosting a major footballing event.

The country oozes class, sophistication and money. There was even a harpist playing at Zurich Airport. The trains do arrive and depart literally to the minute, the scenery is breath-taking with lakes, mountains and Sound of Music-style wooden farm chalets.

Back to the naivety I touched on a few lines back. Given the stunning natural beauty of the place, why would the Swiss want thousands of marauding football supporters invading their peaceful land? I asked numerous Swiss folk that very question and got the same answer every time: “It will be fine”

I sincerely hope it is. Switzerland (and Austria) deserves a successful Euro 2008 and I expect the event will be brilliantly organised down to the last little detail. But my worry relates directly to the stadiums and here’s why: Five of the eight host venues have a ground capacity of just 30,000. The Wankdorf Stadium in Berne holds 32,000; Basle will seat 42,500 while the final will be played at the Ernst Happel Stadion in Vienna on 29 June (capacity 50,000).

Given the horrendous scenes witnessed outside the Olympic Stadium in Athens before the recent Champions League final, I am worried about what would happen should the likes of Germany, Italy or Holland be drawn against England next summer?

Stadiums with capacities of 30,000 just aren’t big enough to cope with the crowds that will turn up. The Swiss believe they will counter this potential threat by setting up football and entertainment zones across their country for fans without tickets to enjoy.

But will they really do that? Will they seriously travel 50 or 100 miles from where England or whoever are playing just to enjoy the big-screen facilities and free public transport that will be on offer?

I think not.

Uefa must do everything in its power along with the two hosts to make sure nothing disastrous happens.

I am not going to go into the rights and wrongs of what a minority of Liverpool followers may have done in Greece last month, but if anything like that was to happen at Euro 2008 then the authorities could have carnage on their hands.

Security will be key to the overall success of the tournament and both countries will not be taking any chances. Samuel Schmid, who is the Swiss defence and sports minister, told me at the launch of the countdown to Euro 2008 in Interlaken, that nothing will be left to chance.

“The work is on track and we are right on schedule. The essential strategies have been drawn up and rollout has begun. But let me make one thing perfectly clear: despite all the talk about safety and security, we intend to celebrate a festival of football in June 2008 and not build fortresses,” he said.

Please let him be right.

Don't worry - all will be resolved soon. We're very much aware that the website is still set-up for the 2006/07 season.

Obviously we couldn't do anything until the Football League play-off finals were completed.

So what exactly do we have to do for the big summer switchover?

For starters, we'll collate a list of all the ups and downs throughout the Premiership, Football League, Conference, Scottish Premier and Scottish League.

Then we need to make sure we place all the teams in the correct divisional index to reflect next season's fixtures, which are released on Thursday 14 June at 1000 BST.

We'll be making sure our technical systems will be ready to take incoming feeds of the fixtures the minute they are released so that you can see who your team is playing and when.

We also need to build brand new indexes for Histon, Salisbury, Droylsden and Farsley Celtic who are the newcomers to the Conference next season.

Subsequently that means our Altrincham, Tamworth, Southport and St Albans sections will not be actively managed until those clubs win promotion back to the Conference.

That's a very brief overview of the work which will take place behind the scenes here over the next week or so.

When that's done and the new fixtures are released, we will turn our attentions to other matters, including how we can improve our football coverage next season.

I'd be interested to read your thoughts...

I did drop a hint about this back in August that I was hoping to add a further football columnist so you can see that it's taken months to get to the point of being able to announce who we signed up.

The transfer window is open after all - so it's great timing.

Our new signing has a unique biography in terms of his upbringing and who he plays for and I'm expecting him to give us his views on a wide range of topics - from playing for England to living and working in Munich...

Owen's column will be weekly and will normally appear on the BBC Sport football website on a Tuesday.

As with our Kevin Nolan column, we will give you the opportunity to quiz Owen yourself by emailing in questions. We will select the most interesting ones each week and Owen will be happy to answer them.

Owen is currently recovering from a broken leg and hopes to be fully fit in a few weeks' time.

I'll leave it to him to tell you all about himself and his views on football once his column gets under way, but suffice to say, his family and playing backgrounds are fascinating.

So, on Tuesday look out for Owen's first column from Bayern Munich's winter training camp in Dubai - and remember to get those questions in.

Unfortunately, we can't bring you all the goalflashes from each tie during the games - because they are not available - but I can tell you how best to follow your team if they are involved.

And if you're wondering why we can't provide latest scores, it's because the Press Association, who supply sports data to websites, broadcasters and newspapers, is unable to provide a live scores service on fourth qualifying round day. (UPDATE 16/11/06: I need to clarify something on my part here. And that is it would be possible for PA Sport, who supply our sports data, to provide live scores from the FA Cup fourth qualifying round, if that was part of our service level agreement with them. At this moment in time, this additional service is not included in our PA Sport contract but it is something we may be able to review in the future.)

So please don't think we are ignoring the Cup just because there are no latest scores on the website, Ceefax, Five Live Sport or on Score.

All the full-time scores will be available as they come through here from 1645 BST - and of course the draw for the FA Cup first round takes place at about 1715 BST on BBC ONE's Final Score, which editor Lance Hardy has been writing about.

Good luck to all those taking part - and come on Scarborough!

We talked to a number of managers and players before making our final decision, but I am pleased to be finally able to reveal the name of our new football columnist.

You will be able to read Kevin’s column on the BBC Sport website on a Wednesday or Thursday, starting this week.

We’re going to be asking him to talk about all aspects of football, including letting us know how he is getting on with Bolton in the Premiership, and also for an insight into his world and giving you an opportunity to ask him questions each week.

This week, he will let you know what type of car he drives, what he does in his spare time on Sunday mornings and why he has a childhood mate to thank for getting him into professional football.

Kevin’s ambition is to break into the England squad - and we think it’s not beyond him if he can impress new head coach Steve McClaren.

With a bit of luck, I am hoping to sign up a second new columnist very soon. Watch this space!

The response was brilliant - so thanks for all the constructive replies. It was good to read the compliments but also to take proper notice of a few criticisms.

As there were too many responses for me to be able answer individually, I have tried to extract the most common themes from your comments about football coverage on our website.

Here are 10 main points:

I am still trying to finalise arrangements for the new season (and yes I have already tried - and failed - to lure some of the people who you suggested) but I am not going to sign-up three or four different people and rotate them because I feel it takes time to build-up familiarity so continuity is important.

Many of you commented about Mark Lawrenson’s predictions. His column is very popular and will return in three weeks - but remember his opinions are purely that - and not everybody is going to agree with him. You can also take him on by playing Challenge Lawro. Alan Hansen will also be telling us his thoughts when his column returns next month.

2) Fantasy Football will not be returning to the BBC Sport website. We had to close down our free game after the 2004/05 season following the introduction of the BBC’s “public value” test.

A report into the BBC’s online services two years ago stated that the Fantasy Football game was not “sufficiently distinctive from commercial alternatives or adequately associated with public service purposes, to be justified by the remit".

3)Tactical analysis is clearly something many of you want to see more of because it offers a bit more in-depth explanation of how games might be won or lost.

We are currently working on producing an improved version of this - so hopefully this application will develop into something even better. It is quite a time-consuming process - but very worthwhile.

4) Impartial news content is definitely important to you. Your feedback suggests that if you read something on the BBC website then you know it is true and has been thoroughly checked out before being published.

5) Which brings me on to our Gossip Column which gets about 400,000 page impressions on a daily basis. Transfer speculation is notoriously difficult to report on as much of it simply isn’t true - so the Gossip Column enables us to draw a distinction between fact and rumour.

6) Comment is another facet of our coverage that we may give greater consideration to in the future.

The World Cup blog showed there is plenty of appetite for comment and although some of you regarded this as “uninspiring drivel” my feeling is that we can do more on this front.

We think we can make more use of our best journalists and bring you more in-depth opinion. There will also be a football blog by the autumn, but we are yet to finalise the details of exactly how this will work.

Comment can also come in the form of covering live events in a more colourful way. We will try to make you feel like you’re in the stadium by bringing you more atmosphere, passion and humour.

7) Team news seems to be of significant value to you and we will be working hard to make this more up-to-date and accurate next season.

Post-match quotes are more important than pre-match quotes and a lot of you remarked that manager and player interviews are not the most inspiring unless something controversial happens during a game.

8) Providing more insight into the world of football is one of the main areas where you feel we have room to improve. This is one of our main on-going challenges because it is not always easy and straightforward to do this.

You want real views and real emotion as opposed to reading more about the corporate side of the game. You want more behind-the-scenes stuff and I will challenge my staff to try to satisfy your thirst.

9) Statistics - i.e. live scores, league tables, fixtures and results are also vital to you, especially on Saturdays.

We've improved our stats over the past couple of years and I am pleased to say that from the new season we will be providing enhanced football stats like we had during the World Cup.

10) Sorry! But to emphasise again, the BBC is not allowed to broadcast radio commentary or show video of live events unless we have the rights to do this.

We did buy the rights to stream the BBC matches during the World Cup after securing an agreement with Fifa.

No such deal is currently in place regarding the Premiership, though we are allowed to provide audio streams of commentaries from Five Live to a UK audience only.

Again, it’s all down to rights and the BBC does not have a licence to be able to stream commentaries from around the world.

But here's some great news; our next Premier League contract, starting in August 2007/08 and spanning three seasons, will allow us to stream Match of the Day and MOTD2 on broadband as simulcasts with the TV shows (for UK users only), so at last all the Premiership goals will be on the BBC Sport website for the first time!

Among the other ideas you submitted were calls for greater depth to our lower division coverage.

It may be that in future we will be able to tap into the BBC’s network of sports journalists across the country and get more locally-produced content on to the website and our other platforms.

It was also suggested that we should not concentrate so much on the big glamour clubs in the Premiership. We do strive to give coverage purely on merit and I assure you we do not go out of our way to provide less content on clubs like Blackburn and Fulham.

So, lots to consider and I’ll keep you posted about any developments - and hopefully will soon have news about our main football columnist for next season…

I am keen to hear your views about our football coverage on the web, TV text and mobile platforms but specifically, these four things...

But do you think such weekly columns from one person are worthwhile or should we have different people writing columns from week-to-week? And would you like more opportunities to quiz/interact with them?

2) Match previews and pre-match quotes - I'd like to know how important you feel team news is and how important is it to read what your manager is saying before games? Or would you prefer to watch press conference video or audio instead? My view is that team news is important, but manager comments are more interesting after games.

3) In-depth - stories behind the stories - many web users only read a few paragraphs of any one story before moving on to look at something else, be that another story or an item of video or audio. I'd like to know your thoughts on our in-depth coverage. Do you want to read longer features and analysis or thought pieces? And if so, on which topics? Or should we concentrate more on breaking news and uncovering more stories? Or both?

4) Comment - picking up from the last point, how much comment do you want to read from BBC Sport journalists (not necessarily talking only about football)? Our World Cup blog went down well with thousands of you - so should we do something similar for domestic football?

If you're wondering why I am asking for your thoughts, well, some significant changes were announced by the BBC this week - and journalism is one of the major topics on our agenda.

I can’t promise that I will be able to reply to all of your points of views, but rest assured all comments will be read and taken into consideration as we plan our coverage of the 2006/07 season.

Over to you…

That was the 2006 Fifa World Cup finals.

Congratulations to Italy.

And so on to Euro 2008 in Austria-Switzerland and then South Africa in 2010.

But what did you make of BBC Sport's coverage of the World Cup finals?

All the departments within BBC Sport will be holding various de-briefing sessions involving the staff who are returning from Germany, plus those of us who were based back in London.

Here on the BBC Sport website we embarked on an ambitious programme of new innovations such as our enhanced Virtual Replay, interactive Player Ratings, an interactive world map and improved live match statistics.

We’ve had a few relatively minor technical issues but overall we are satisfied with how these applications performed.

The website team is holding a full de-briefing session on Thursday week to fully review the various World Cup projects. We'll let you know how we get on.

And if you are already having withdrawal symptoms – don’t worry, the Champions League gets under way on Tuesday!

I'd spent more than a year planning the World Cup editorial coverage for the BBC Sport website and to watch England go out on penalties yet again was a huge disappointment.

So how did we handle the pressure back at the website nerve centre?

Charlie Henderson produced another mesmeric minute-by-minute account of the action. He really brings the game alive for those of you who were unable to watch live TV pictures.

Some lovely phrases in there, plus juicy tit-bits from BBC Sport pundits and our chief football writer Phil McNulty inside the stadium.

And well done to Saj Chowdhury for providing all the pre-match build-up before Charlie took over the live action.

The game's turning point - Wayne Rooney's sending off - was big news so we had to quickly get on to that. Good, quick work from Frank Keogh.

Although there were no goals during the 120 agonising minutes, there was still plenty to write about and Andrew McKenzie produced a superbly-written, yet concise match report which summed everything up perfectly.

As we also produce all the content for Ceefax Sport, we need our match reports to be finished and ready for publishing on the full-time whistle. No pressure there then!

I already had headlines ENGLAND BEATEN ON PENALTIES AGAIN and PENALTY SHOOT-OUT WIN FOR ENGLAND all ready to go the second the final whistle was blown. Shame I couldn't use the latter one.

While all this was taking place, Pete Scrivener from our Communities team, was producing a live photo gallery which again helped illustrate all the drama from Gelsenkirchen.

Our popular new live Player Ratings were marshalled by Ian Hughes and you chose wisely - picking Owen Hargreaves as your England man-of-the-match.

After the despair of the penalties, we had Nathan Mercer keeping an ear on what the BBC Sport pundits had to say about England's sad exit.

And John May was soon bashing out a quick Sven-Goran Eriksson reaction piece as the sun set on the Swede's reign as England boss.

Amid the chaos of all of this, the Brazil-France game was about to get underway so we left John Sinnott across this while Charlie H dashed off to grab a sandwich in time to take over the live updates from that game.

We do aspire to produce great content that is also of the highest grammatical standards, so well done to sub-editor Lewis Wiltshire, who was my right-hand man.

And what did I do? Well, having a great team around you is one of the arts of management so I was able to sit back and watch most of the game (while of course keeping a close eye on what was being written).

After that, I went into rapid planning mode to produce our master plan to cover the fall-out from England's and Eriksson's exit and start planning for a new era under Steve McClaren.

This has almost turned into an Oscar's speech-blog. So I will stop. Feeling a bit better now, so maybe I don't really hate football that much after all.

There's always Euro 2008!

Seems a bit mad, but fans back home are already gearing up for the new domestic season.

All the fixtures are on the BBC Sport website so you can all start planning for those ridiculous midweek trips down to the other end of the country on a freezing night in November!

You can read here how we work behind the scenes to get the fixtures to you on time.

We heard at lunchtime that Ruud van Nistelrooy would not be playing against Charlton and that the striker had "driven away" from Old Trafford.

It didn't take long for stories to appear on our news wires speculating that Ruud would soon by sent packing from the club by Sir Alex Ferguson.

But would it have been right for us at the BBC Sport website to have done the same?

We did decide to write a story explaining the facts as we had them at the time stating that Van Nistelrooy was not playing, United had confirmed he had left the ground and there would be no further comment until after the match against Charlton.

Some of our colleagues at other websites wrote stories suggesting Ruud had "stormed out" of Old Trafford - but did they really know that for a fact?

Interestingly, the Press Association, who supply news stories to many outlets in the UK and beyond, sent out two feature pieces on their newswire. One was his career factfile, the other on Man Utd outcasts - players who have fallen out with Fergie in the past and subsequently been axed.

The headlines on Monday will no doubt say Ruud's career at Man Utd is over - and while I am sure that will be the case after Ferguson said the Dutchman had endangered team spirit during training last week - it would have been unwise for us to rattle off a Ruud's off in his Van headline, no matter how tempting that may have been!

Our aim is simply to provide users of the BBC Sport website with something unique, engaging and totally fantastic for the 2006 World Cup finals.

We were proud of the way we covered the 2002 World Cup in Japan and Korea. After all, many of the games were during 'office hours' and a lot of you could only follow what was happening in the Far East via your computers.

Things have really moved on since then, so here's how we plan to satisfy your every World Cup need this time.

Our chief football writer Phil McNulty willl bring you every bit of breaking news and info from the England camp while Mandeep Sanghera will be our “roving reporter” who’ll file from other major games at the tournament.

But it's not just about our world-class journalism - we'll be providing loads of extra things on top.

And when the game kicks off, don't just watch it, become part of it, with our live match coverage including up-to the-minute reports, photos and stats, virtual replay animations and a live player rater where you get the chance to give the star of the show a 10-out-of-10, or hit the underperformers with a two-out-of-10.

We’re also sending two people across Germany to live the World Cup for those of us left behind. See how they get on and where they go on our World Cup blog. You can even suggest to our men in Germany where they should visit next.

If all that's not enough, try your luck with our quiz, Goal Finger, or attempt to win great prizes with the World Cup Daq game, which involves trading in 'shares' based on the teams participating at the tournament.

We cannot wait to play a part in it for you - and one of the bosses will be here writing this blog for the duration, so don't forget to tell us how you feel we're doing.