Thousands of football fans missed the goal that took England into the second round at the World Cup after a power cut affected parts of south-west London. The black-out struck Richmond and Twickenham at 3:20 on Wednesday - 20 minutes into the Three Lions' make-or-break Group C clash with Slovenia.

Striker Jermain Defoe scored what proved to be the winning goal in the match at Port Elizabeth on 23 minutes, meaning fans at pubs in the area were left watching blank screens.

Energy supplier EDF took the blame for the chaos and said it was down to a fault on a high-voltage cable network. The company apologised for the incident, which cut power for more than an hour.

An EDF spokesman said: "EDF Energy Networks would like to apologise to several thousand customers in the Twickenham area who lost power supplies at 3.20pm after a fault on the electricity distribution network.

"The first customers had power again within six minutes with all supplies back on, in stages, by 4.38pm.

"We recognise this incident will have affected viewing of England's World Cup match and our engineers worked as quickly and as safely as possible to restore supplies."