In no area is this link between success and insanity more apparent than in football management, where the best men often display not so much a degree of craziness as a degree in it. Therefore, if you want to know who will win the World Cup you should not analyse the squads and tactics, but psychoanalyse the coaches.

The Argentinians won in 1986, for example, thanks in no small measure to the flagrantly unhinged Carlos Bilardo. As a player in the 1960s Bilardo belonged to a group of Estudiantes players known as the Young Assassins. A midfielder of rare malevolence, it is perhaps sufficient to say that even Antonio Rattin considered him a right dirty bastard.

Bilardo carried on in much the same vein as a manager, refusing to let his players exchange shirts with opponents and stomping, yelling and turning the colour of an over-ripe damson before the kick-in was finished. Surprisingly, he was also a doctor who had practised as a gynaecologist. You can only hope he waved his arms around a lot less during crucial moments in that job.

In the lead-up to France 98 it looked as if Argentina had found a worthy successor in Daniel Passarella. On assuming the job Passarella issued an edict: he would not pick homosexuals, players with earrings or long hair, or players who looked like women. This seemed the authentic voice of lunacy, especially since on one count or another it excluded every one of Argentina's best players.

The truth was altogether less excitingly off-his-crust. When Passarella captained Argentina's World Cup-winning side of 1978 the manager was the chain-smoking Cesar Luis Menotti. Menotti looked like the type of ageing lothario you might find tapping out the rhythm of You Sexy Thing on the table in a provincial wine bar but he was a coach of mental subtlety. When his star striker, Mario Kempes, was struggling to score in the early stages, Menotti told him to shave off his moustache. It was so effective that Kempes hit six goals in the knockout phase, including two in the final. What appeared madness in Passarella was merely historical precedent mixed with old-style bigotry. His team lost to the Dutch in the quarterfinals.

Passarella's successor, Marcelo Bielsa, also appeared to have the right stuff. This was a man so obsessed with football he did nothing but watch videos of games 24 hours a day, a man who spoke sentences so long he made Garth Crooks seem monosyllabic. The Argentinian press nicknamed him "The Mad Man", but that turned out to be wishful thinking. Bielsa -- brother of the Argentinian foreign minister, incidentally -- was merely a nerd. As a consequence an Argentina squad packed with talent failed to get beyond the group stage, while arch rivals Brazil went all the way thanks to Big Phil Scolari running up and down the touchline in that strange crouch of his, ranting and pointing like an irascible neighbour who has just had his pants set alight by Stan Laurel and can't find a water butt to sit in.

The human mind is a mysterious thing, as likely to sell us a dummy as Ronaldinho. Often what we take for the febrile spark of inspirational delirium is revealed in competition as merely the final pop of asininity's dull bulb. So we must tread warily when making predictions. While Poland's Pawel Janas has shown promising symptoms of the kamikaze spirit in discarding his top scorer, Tomasz Frankowski, for no good cause, and Germany's Juergen Klinsmann increasingly sounds like one of those residents of California who end up wearing all white and yelping like dogs in a bid to rid themselves of emotional blockages, don't think either is quite the finished article.

France can be fancied. True, they struggled in qualifying, but their coach, Raymond Domenech, has recently revealed a deep-rooted belief in astrology and announced that he doesn't trust Scorpios. Luckily, he hasn't picked any. It worked for Ronald Reagan when he was winning presidential elections, defeating communism and living with a chimpanzee, and it could do something similar for Domenech and Les Bleus.

Though a lot will depend on the alignment of the planets, clearly.