Rowing: British crews have six weeks to sharpen up for Seville

British crews came home from Munich with a clear idea of the task facing them in the six weeks leading to the World Championships in Seville.

Second to Germany in the final rankings of the World Cup looks impressive until you see there were no gold medals, and precious few others, for Britons in this final round, and that Germany clocked up 209 points to Britain's 103.

There is a lot of sharpening up to be done, not least by James Cracknell and Matthew Pinsent, who stayed away from Munich to address their defeat by the Australians three weeks ago. They are back to basics on the Thames and awaiting delivery of a new boat from Germany, more forgiving than the British model they took deli-very of before Henley.

The first Munich observation is that the new, young and raw men's eight will not meet the selection criteria of a place in the top six at the worlds, even though they reached the World Cup final on Saturday. But it is virtually certain they will be selected for Seville because they produced an upbeat performance, especially in their repêchage, that we have not seen from a British eight this side of Sydney 2000, where the result was gold.

Last week began with the prospect of gold medals for the coxless four of Josh West, Steve Williams, Toby Garbett and Rick Dunn, and the double scullers Frances Houghton and Debbie Flood. The four came away with silver and the pair with fourth.

The four lost to the Germans by less than a second and were a bit annoyed with how they conducted their race. They have not raced for two months because of illness to Williams and exam commitments, and were outpaced by the Germans in the first half of the final, but fastest over the second half.

Williams, Garbett and Dunn are the 2001 world champions, West having replaced the injured Ed Coode in the boat this season, and the Germans are the world silver medallists.

Saturday made this season's score between them 2-2, but the British crew is confident they will make it 3-2 after two weeks' altitude camp and four more weeks of uninterrupted rowing. They are currently the best hope for a world title in Seville.

Houghton and Flood regressed to fourth place after winning the first two rounds of the World Cup. Their undoing was the arrival of world silver medallists Georgina and Caroline Evers-Swindell, from New Zealand, who won the event comfortably, with just over two seconds separating first and fourth.

It may also have been down to the experiment they are conducting with rigging – the equation between the length of the oars, the distance inboard and outboard, and the span of the outriggers. But coach Mark Banks was sanguine. Three weeks ago he reckoned his crew were 3.5 seconds off the pace. "Now we're 2.3 seconds off it," he said. "We know we are getting there."

The women's quad had a new line-up, with Alison Mowbray moving from the stroke seat to the bow seat and Rebecca Romero coming in at stroke. They finished third and there is no reason to doubt there is more to come from a crew that includes Katherine Grainger, a graduate of the crew that won Britain's first-ever Olympic women's rowing medal in Sydney.

There was bronze for the lightweight double scullers Helen Casey and Tracy Langlands, the overall winners of the World Cup for their event. The men's lightweight double, Tim Male and Tom Kay, were brilliant until they were dumped into fifth place in their final, while the second coxless four are fast enough to do some damage at the World Championships with a cox on board.

In non-World Cup events, the lightweight eight won ad edgy bronze in a three-boat final. The lightweight pair of Naomi Ashcroft and Leone Barron won gold, and the men's lightweight quad won bronze.