My copy has been autographed in blue felt-tip by head coach Myong Rye Hyon and seven of his players.

These include Pak Do Ik, scorer of the goal that sunk mighty Italy, one of the perhaps only three North Koreans to have achieved lasting international fame.
 

Why bring this up now?

Because North Korea has just qualified for next year’s World Cup finals in South Africa for the first time since 1966.
 

And because the story of these now old men illustrates with unusual clarity the very special power of sport.
 

First there is the power of positive PR: if there is a single other edifying story to have emanated from the so-called Hermit State in the past 50 years, I haven’t heard it.
 

Then there is the power to build emotional bridges between the most disparate of groups.
 

I was once told that when Pak Do Ik’s son was said to have been killed in a traffic accident some years ago, letters of condolence were sent to North Korea from Middlesbrough, the not especially cosmopolitan town in North-East England where the match against Italy took place.

Rogue state or no rogue state, I have a feeling I won’t be the only Englishman keeping a special eye out for North Korea’s matches in South Africa next year. 

 

Golden Girls buoying British sport
 

● Five years ago, a doubtless apocryphal story did the rounds at the Athens Olympics about a narrow escape for a newspaper said to have been planning a ‘Golden Girls’-type feature about a burst of success for British female athletes.
 

In the nick of time, the story went, somebody realised that Leslie Law, the gold medal-winning three-day eventer, was the wrong gender for inclusion in such a piece.
 

Perhaps the newspaper should be planning a similar article now.
 

From the pool to the cricket square, the velodrome to the boxing ring, British sportswomen are becoming world-beaters.
 

It may seem a strange time to be making that claim after another poor Wimbledon for the British Ladies.
 

But even here, the precocious Laura Robson looks the country’s best female tennis prospect for a very long time.
 

The interesting question is, why is this happening?
 

Part of the answer must be the rigorous application of sports science and performance enhancement theory, backed up with generous, targeted funding, which contributed to Team GB’s spectacular medals haul at last year’s Beijing Olympics.
 

In addition, I think a new seriousmindedness is taking root across more and more British women’s sports – among athletes and observers alike.
 

This is epitomised by Charlotte Edwards’s (pictured) women’s cricket team, whose dedication and evident determination to make the most of every scintilla of talent at their disposal has carried them head and shoulders above their rivals.
 

I was particularly struck by the euphoric tone of a recent piece by Mike Selvey, the Guardian cricket correspondent who is now one of our most respected writers on the sport.
 

“I cannot say that I was a women's cricket agnostic,” Selvey wrote in an article whose opening sentence had announced that “Cupid struck bullseye last week and bluebirds sang”.
 

“But perhaps a reluctance born from uninformed scepticism kept me away.
 

“I was familiar with many of the players, mixed with them at functions and so forth, but never had I seen them play.
 

“So to watch them perform with such vivacity and skill was an absolute revelation.”
 

That last sentence precisely describes the way I felt after watching my first women’s boxing match.
 

There is also, I think, a social dimension, which has been a factor in recent success and augurs well for the future.
 

Basically, in Britain today, there is almost no activity left – sporting or otherwise – from which it is thought acceptable to exclude participants on grounds of gender.
 

Girls who want to do boxing, say, or the more physically demanding team sports, are no longer widely viewed as oddballs or worse.
 

The “snigger factor” which has dogged many women’s sports for as long as I can remember, is finally receding.
 

This is, in turn, I fancy, starting to encourage a change in attitudes towards sport among teenage girls: organised games, it seems to me, are beginning to be seen as less terminally uncool by this group than they used to be.
 

We are already witnessing the positive results of these various trends in sports arenas from St John’s Wood to Bulgaria.
 

This, though, may be just the beginning.

 

Seconds out for boxing talks
 

●Ho Kim, executive director of AIBA, the international amateur boxing association, will be in London this week for high-level meetings with top British officials.
 

He tells me that the subject for discussion will be the new World Series of Boxing, whose inaugural season is expected to get under way in September next year.
 

I find it hard to believe, however, that the vexed issue of the London 2012 boxing venue will not come up at some point.

 

Olympic status will provide massive boost for rugby sevens
 

● I think it’s safe to assume that Springboks coach Peter de Villiers is unlikely to play too big a part in the final stages of rugby’s drive to get onto the programme for the 2016 Olympics.
 

However, the remorseless, bone-juddering intensity of the recent three-Test series with the British and Irish Lions has got me thinking for the first time that perhaps Olympic status may help rugby sevens, in time, to assume as big a role in rugby’s future as Twenty20 looks set to play in cricket’s.
 

With cricket, the main impetus behind the growth of the short-form game has come from television.
Non-specialist TV stations simply cannot justify cluttering up 30-plus hours of their main flagship channels broadcasting five-day Test matches.
 

So a more broadcaster-friendly format was desperately needed.
 

With rugby, broadcasters have no problem accommodating the 80 minutes of a 15-a-side game, so the driver behind any upsurge in the relative importance of the short-form seven-a-side format would probably be different.
 

I have a feeling that such a driver might just materialise in the shape of concerns over the sheer physical demands and injury risk associated with 15-a-side rugby, not least among parents of junior players.
 

Though rugby sevens might be exhausting, particularly in the heat and humidity one often finds at an Olympic Games in August, I am not aware that its players are particularly vulnerable to injury.
 

If Olympic status is granted, allowing substantially more people to appreciate what a good game sevens is, I would not be at all surprised to see more and more schools turning to it.
 

Once that happens, its importance could grow quite quickly.