Hollow World Cup victory?

PA 149/10 If England manage to get out of the group stages, continuing this evening against Algeria, and then go on to win the World Cup, they may find the victory a hollow one, according to one scientist at The University of Nottingham. In the latest entry in the award-winning video project Periodic Table of Videos ( http://tiny.cc/rziig ), Professor Martyn Poliakoff concludes that the World Cup trophy must be hollow and not solid gold as variously described. Professor Poliakoff suggests a solid trophy this size would be far too heavy to lift and calculates it would weigh as much as 80 kilograms Professor Poliakoff also believes lifting such a trophy would be bad for both player and the object itself: "Gold is quite an unusual metal because it's really very soft. And you can't make anything that's very artistic out of pure gold, or at least you could but it's so soft that when people start to handle it roughly it would bend. "So people add other metals to the gold to make it tougher, to make it stronger. And in general the more other metals you add the stronger it gets. With this big trophy; if it was made out of pure gold the first time the footballer lifted it above his head it would bend.