Roberts to substitute for Sven

Michael Roberts, the former British and South African champion jockey, is set to step into the boots of England coach Sven-Goran Eriksson at Ascot on Saturday.

Eriksson pulled out at the last minute as manager of the Rest of the World team in Saturday's Blue Square Shergar Cup.

However, the Ascot executive has refused to be stunned by the late blow to one of their biggest days of the year.

The competition, between two sides of jockeys, The Rest versus Britain and Ireland, the latter managed by England Under-21 coach David Platt, is one of the annual highlights at the Group One course, and Eriksson excused himself from his duties, for which he would have been paid £5,000, by announcing he had to watch a friendly match between Leeds and Aston Villa in Dublin instead.

Nick Smith, the track's head of Public Relations, said: "We will keep looking for a replacement for Sven, but we are not too panicked about it, even though it is very late in the day. The trouble is that the kind of people you would be looking at do tend to need a lot more notice.

"It's not that easy just to pluck someone out of thin air of the level of Sven, and we wouldn't want to have somebody who didn't quite work out.