Not a lot takes me by surprise in football after all the years I have been associated with the sport, but Lord Triesman’s resignation as chairman of the Football Association certainly did.

There’s been lots said and written about comments he was reported to have said, and while I wouldn’t want to get involved in details of that, what I would say is it was hugely regrettable and very sad as far as the individual was concerned.

Lord Triesman and I get on extremely well, there’s no secret about that, but it has happened and we move on and at the FA we have moved on positively.

The FA board sat down after we learned of Triesman’s resignation and it was decided Roger Burden – of the National Game Board at the FA – would take over as sole acting chairman, while alongside my chairmanship of the Football Regulatory Authority I would take an acting position as chairman of the FA Council.

As a board we will begin the selection process for finding a new chairman, but independency is to be looked at again – we may look into seeing if we can find someone who has a football background in our next appointment, but that might take some time.

Triesman resigned not only from the FA but also in his role as chairman of England’s bid to host the 2018 FIFA World Cup.

There’s no point making out what happened was something we would have wished for, things were going well with 2018 and suddenly we lose the chairman of our bid.

But I have been quite impressed in the last week or so with the way we have managed to speak to the vast majority of executive members at Fifa who will vote and I believe our bid, which is a very good one, is still very much on track and there’s no reason to believe it has been seriously affected by events of the last few weeks.

While England’s performance in the World Cup, which starts in five day’s time, would, I’m sure, give a little boost to our 2018 bid, it’s not based on performance, it is based on infrastructure and stadia and stability in a country.

One hopes those that judge us on what is an excellent bid, will make their decisions solely on that basis.

The expectancy for England in this World Cup is enormous. I think deep down there is a huge expectation amongst the public.

The atmosphere for the Mexico game, which I was at, was electric.

Perhaps the country needs the England team to do well for all sorts of social and economic reasons; maybe we could all do with some good news.

There’s no doubt the country will benefit from the legacy of a World Cup. I would anticipate that if we were to have a successful tournament, in all aspects of participation, we would see an uplift in Kent.

The way we can maximise this opportunity is to ensure there are enough coaches to coach, enough clubs to join and in this county we have a good range of charter standard clubs to do just that.

The opportunity is there and a successful World Cup gives you that and I’m certain football wouldn’t pass that up.

The one thing that concerns me is the future of some of our senior clubs who have seen their gates dwindle over the last couple of years.

There’s clearly a lot of hard work that needs to be done, and it won’t be easy, but the World Cup could help.

I would encourage the senior clubs in Kent to be proactive and try and sit on the back of success with the publicity of the World Cup.

If communities want their clubs to remain representing them, they have got to back them. If they don’t, they’ll lose them.

• Barry Bright, the chairman of the Kent FA and vice-chairman of the FA, is one of KOS Media’s regular sports columnists.