These are heady days once again for David Beckham.

On Wednesday night he was in New York, hobnobbing with Pele at a black-tie benefit. Then he red-eyed it back to California courtesy of a corporate jet and was out at the Home Depot Center working as hard as ever Thursday morning.

Small wonder that England Coach Fabio Capello on Thursday included Beckham in his squad of 30 for next week's friendly international against France in Paris.

Small wonder, too, that Beckham once again is the darling of the television cameras, with a couple of interviews done Thursday with Jim Hill and Max Bretos and with upcoming appearances with Anderson Cooper on "60 Minutes" and on "The Tonight Show With Jay Leno."

On Thursday, the 32-year-old midfielder was taking it all in stride. He looks as fit as ever, with a new ultra-short haircut and a new ultra-intense focus on the Major League Soccer season only eight days away.

Beckham is taking MLS seriously, not just to repair the damage done by his injury-riddled 2007 season but, as Cooper will report Sunday in a profile on the English icon, he and American Idol creator Simon Fuller apparently have an option to buy an MLS team once Beckham's Galaxy days are over.

For the immediate moment, Beckham's thoughts are on becoming only the fifth player in history to make 100 appearances for England. He has 99 and could hit the century mark in Paris since it seems unlikely that Capello would ask a player to travel 6,000 miles simply to sit on the bench. Beckham leaves for Europe on Saturday.

"It'll be a wonderful moment for David and something that I think he's looked forward to and, to be quite honest, in a certain way has weighed on everybody's mind including David's," Alexi Lalas, the Galaxy's president and general manager, said Thursday. "So it will be nice to finally get to that pinnacle that we all know he can get to and deserves."

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Poland's Dutch coach, Leo Beenhakker, has selected a 30-man squad for Wednesday's game against the U.S. in Krakow. The roster, which will be trimmed before then, includes 16 foreign-based players. The Poles are in good form at the moment and this year already have shut out Finland, 1-0, the Czech Republic, 2-0, and Estonia, 2-0, as they prepare for Euro 2008 in June.

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Mexico Coach Hugo Sanchez, already in hot water for failing to qualify his team for the Olympics, courted further controversy Thursday by including defender AaronGalindo in his squad for the national team's game against Ghana in London next week.

Galindo was one of two players sent home from the FIFA Confederations Cup in Germany in 2005 after failing a doping test. He and Salvador Carmona were banned for one year, and Carmona last year was banned for life after failing a second drug test.

Galindo now plays for Eintracht Frankfurt in Germany.

Also on Mexico's roster are two players who likely would have gone to Beijing had Mexico qualified: strikers Giovani dos Santos of Barcelona and Nery Castillo of Manchester City. Former No. 1 goalkeeper Oswaldo Sanchez also earned a recall, at the expense of Guillermo "Memo" Ochoa.

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Meanwhile, Pele and Ronaldo have engaged in a bit of a verbal duel, sparked when Pele claimed in Rio de Janeiro that the 31-year-old AC Milan star would have trouble recovering fully after rupturing a tendon in his left knee. "To return to his level of play after two serious injuries, I think it is difficult," Pele said. "Medicine has made progress, but Ronaldo's age has too."

The suggestion that his career might be over brought a quick return jab from Ronaldo. "I'm actually glad he said that," Ronaldo told Brazil's Radio Globo. "We all know Pele is known for making wrong predictions about everything. It usually happens the opposite of what he says."

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Elsewhere, the defending Olympic champion U.S. women's national team, under Coach Pia Sundhage, will play Australia twice this spring, in Cary, N.C., on April 27 and in Birmingham, Ala., on May 3. . . . "After 34 years as a coach, I have decided to change my way of living." So said Karel Bruckner, the 68-year-old coach of the Czech Republic in announcing Thursday that he would retire after Euro 2008. . . . Barcelona's summer trip to the U.S. is a virtual certainty, with the New York Red Bulls already penciled in as one opponent for Coach Frank Rijkaard's side on Aug. 7 in New Jersey. . . . Real Madrid, which also will be visiting and has a game Aug. 9 against Real Salt Lake, on Wednesday lost Dutch striker Ruud van Nistelrooy for the rest of the season when he flew to Amsterdam to have surgery on his troublesome right ankle. . . . Reports that Real Madrid and Chelsea are interested in Werder Bremen's Brazilian striker, Diego, have brought a tirade from the German team's president, Jurgen Born. "If someone wants to buy Diego, they have to kill me first," Born told the Spanish radio station Onda Cero. "Diego will only leave over my dead body. He is not for sale."

grahame.jones@latimes.com