World Cup sites shown yellow card

Foul play

World Cup organisers are as sick as parrots after being told that their Web sites aren't up to scratch.

Internet performance monitors - Keynote - showed host nations Japan and South Korea the red card after their sites' poor performances.

The Japanese organising committee's official Web site, www.jawoc.or.jp seems
to have suffered the most with Keynote claiming that slow download times have resulted in the site being unavailable to many users at peak times.

The Korean Organising Committee's official site, www.2002worldcupkorea.org did slightly better but also has been hit by heavy demand.

And this comes on top of reports that FIFA's site has crashed on a number of occasions as fans tried to buy tickets for games.

Said Keynote's Eric Nataf: "Japan and Korea managed to secure this year's biggest global event, but unfortunately the network infrastructure is not quite up to the task of hosting it online for a worldwide audience. What's more, the thousands unable to reach the ticketing site will be livid." ®