NEW YORK, May 19, (Agencies): England’s bid for glory at the World Cup will be hurt by the exhaustion of their players after a long season of fast-paced Premier League football, Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson said on Tuesday. “The intensity of the English game is so great that it makes it more difficult for those players to perform well in the World Cup,” Ferguson told reporters at a news conference promoting Manchester United’s four-game North American summer tour. “You have to say the number of games, particularly at our level, is exhausting. “Every game Manchester United play is a Cup final. We have to win, and teams playing against us are motivated to play against Manchester United.”

Ferguson said his players competing in the World Cup will be in urgent need of the 28 days of rest they are given before returning to training with United for next season. “They must have that or they won’t feature next year, they’ll just collapse. Exhaustion will get them, which makes it difficult for English players to perform well in the World Cup,” he added. United’s leading striker Wayne Rooney, who carries the weight of the nation’s expectations every time he pulls on an England shirt, struggled with injury towards the end of the season but Ferguson said he would be fit for the finals. “... if he wasn’t (fit), there would probably be headlines all over the papers. I’m sure he’ll be all right. I’m sure he’s OK.” Asked who would win the tournament in South Africa which starts on June 11 Ferguson went with the form books. “My general view is that Brazil are very strong favourites with Spain following them,” Ferguson told Reuters after embracing the head of United’s U.S. supporters club following the news conference.

“...I think that France will do better than people think. They are underdogs, which is not normal for them, and Italy will probably get to the semi-finals.” Meanwhile, two unrelated events in the last year have had a huge impact on Wayne Rooney’s life. The departure of Cristiano Ronaldo from Manchester United at the end of last season changed Rooney’s role on the pitch and the arrival of baby son Kai in November changed his life off it. He has been in superb form ahead of the World Cup and will vie with Cristiano Ronaldo of Portugal, as well as Lionel Messi of Argentina, Fernando Torres of Spain and Brazil’s Kaka to be the leading light of the tournament and bring home the trophy.

“I hope to do better than them because, if that happens, then England have to win the World Cup so I will be happy on both fronts,” he said after being named the Professional Footballers Association Player of the Year at the end of April. The Footballer of the Year award, voted for by the country’s football writers, followed a few days later and added to the happiness in both his private and professional life. England will win the World Cup this summer after overcoming their traditional Achilles heel to beat Spain on penalties in the final, according to “lighthearted” analysis by JP Morgan on Wednesday. The US bank’s number crunchers have applied complex quantitative analysis — more normally used to assess investment opportunities — to the 32 teams in the tournament in South Africa, which kicks off on June 11.

JP Morgan says Brazil are the strongest team but predicts they will crash out to the Netherlands after a penalty shootout in the quarter-finals. The model sees Wayne Rooney’s England knocking out the Dutch in the semi-finals before conquering Spain in the final, winning in a penalty shootout — the method which has so often been their downfall. While England’s predicted victory may not be too far-fetched, even the most ardent fans of minnows Slovenia will have trouble believing JP Morgan’s prediction that they will reach the semi-finals before losing to Spain. The model, set out in a 69-page report, uses the straightforward bookmakers’ odds and FIFA rankings and measures factors such as price trends and investors’ sentiment. The two analysts who came up with the model, Matthew Burgess and Marco Dion, said it was just “an ideal opportunity to light-heartedly explain quantitative techniques”. But Spain, the bookmakers’ favourites, can probably take the findings with a pinch of salt — quantitative analysis was widely criticised for failing to predict the financial crisis.