Market report: Friday close

ENGLAND'S World Cup victory over Argentina did nothing to lift the gloom over shares. Trading was at a virtual standstill as dealers stayed glued to their TV screens for the game.

The FTSE 100 index, down 106 points just after half time, was off 64.6 points at 4893.0 at the end of the match. Only 200,000 shares were bought or sold as Beckham led England to a 1-0 win. Business resumed swiftly as traders returned to their desks, however, and the figures was soon up to more than 1.6bn shares. By the close, the Footsie was off 37.2 points at 4920.4.

Blue-chips stayed in the doldrums, suffering from the overnight gloom from across the Atlantic, where Wall Street slid almost 2% after Intel issued a sales warning. The Dow Jones dropped heavily when New York opened today.

Hopes of Arm Holdings surviving in the Footsie looked to have been dashed as the shares fell 9p to 163 1/2p. Cookson Group makes PC components and, given its debt problems, the shares were soon in the top half of the FTSE 250 losers with a fall of 7p to 76 1/2p.

Vodafone hit a new low of 90 1/4p as talk of a placing did the rounds. At the close, the shares had recovered to show a loss of 1 1/2p at 95p.

MmO2 also struggled, falling 1 1/2p to 37 3/4p, down 2 3/4p.The poor old techMARK 100 was in the doldrums, hitting a new low of 934.18 before bouncing back a little to 939.24, a loss of 19.57.

Fears of relegation from the Footsie haunted Invensys, down 4 1/2p to 102 1/2p. In

all the carnage among tech stocks, dealers sought shares with defensive qualities and Gallaher topped the blue-chip risers with a 28p gain to 650p, Lattice added 3 1/2p to 183 3/4p, Severn Trent spurted 8 1/2p to 780 1/2p and National Grid powered ahead 7 1/4p to 498p.

Shire Pharmaceuticals was down 2p at 486p. Earlier it topped the blue-chip risers with a gain of 19 3/4p following its presentation to medics at a conference in Oviedo, Spain, of data on its drug to help patients undergoing dialysis.

Worries about

Irish-owned Elan Corporation's cash and liquidity hit the biopharmaceuticals group again with a fall of 55p to 467 1/2p despite reassurances from the board.

The humiliating rebuke for EU Competition Commissioner Mario Monti over his decision three years ago to stop travel company Airtours buying rival First Choice reverberated round the markets.

Although Airtours, now renamed MyTravel, is not expected to come back into the bidding, it means the European Commission's ability to vet and prevent mergers will be undermined.

Consolidation within the British travel industry was again on the agenda and some of the sector favourites managed to add a few pence.

Property group Minerva, holder of a 21.4% stake in underperforming Allders, denied it has been approached by Bhs chief executive Terry Green about the future of the department stores chain. Minerva fell 1p to 273 1/2p and Allders lost 1 1/2p to 162p.

Geoff Foster of the Daily Mail on yesterday's trading

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