PRESTON has sold out to the World Cup frenzy - leading to an England shirt draught!

The town's sport shops are swiftly ordering dozens more of the red, white and blue tops as insatiable soccer fans snap up the stock.

But shop managers are preparing to give eager England fans the bad news - ordering the shirts is proving to be an even bigger challenge than getting through to the second round of the World Cup finals. And last Monday's England 2-0 win over Tunisia has boosted demand to record levels.

Carol Judson, manager of Sports Max, said: "Like most other sports shops we sold out of adult England white shirts around a week before their first game. "We always get a huge demand when big events, like the World Cup, are on but this time the popularity seems to be at its all-time high."

Other stores also seem to have been caught out as Umbro's media manager Helen Willis, speaking from France, told the Citizen.

She said: "We have produced an enormous amount of shirts which have been distributed all over the world. We give the shops the exact amount of shirts they order so I think they may have underestimated the popularity of the shirts."

She added that the shops probably gauged their order on the successful Euro '96 tournament, when shirt sales also rocketed.

She added: "Sports shops up and down the country are selling out because they didn't estimate how early and quickly World Cup fever would catch on."

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