Football

I wonder if the moral guardians of our country — the England football team — intend to participate in the 2022 World Cup in Qatar? Most of the players are currently kicking their heels (and presumably missing) in such places as the Turks and Caicos Islands, so they have plenty of time for rumination. Having become, in the words of their manager, a ‘beacon of light’ within a country of savages and bigots, it will be interesting to see if their moral stance extends to boycotting a tournament which is to be held in a totalitarian slave state that outlaws homosexuality and isn’t entirely up to speed on the issue of women. Further — graft, corruption and greed were among the reasons why Qatar was chosen in the first place.

Earlier this year, I noted the suggestion (made by an American academic and run with by a swathe of the British press) that we may be about to enter a party decade. The claim was that much as the Great War was followed by the Roaring Twenties, so the Covid era might be followed by a roaring 2020s. Advocates of the theory might point to the queues of young people waiting to get into the country’s nightclubs at one minute past midnight on Monday’s so-called ‘freedom day’. But I would suggest that there is more evidence accumulating in the opposite direction. Far from roaring, I would say it is more likely that we are entering the era of the Boring Twenties.

There are two certainties whenever England’s football team plays; one that is long-established and the other a recent phenomenon. Players who never miss a penalty during training sessions will end up fluffing their attempts under the pressure of a shoot-out. And the post-match discussion of football will quickly move on to the issue of racism. England’s first appearance in the final of a major tournament since the 1966 World Cup ought to have been a moment of national celebration. Indeed, that is how it seemed until the three missed penalties. Within hours, though, few seemed to be talking about anything other than the racist abuse directed at the three players who missed the target.

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna My fiery Italian wife Carla is not just a passionate patriot but also a devout Catholic, and so with perfidious Albion looking good and leading gli azzurri one-nil she disappeared to wash her hair and pray to the Madonna. The next day, when the dust had settled, I asked her why. ‘I was suffering so much pain that I felt like swearing and blaspheming at the inglesi,’ she said. That left me — a lone inglese — in front of the TV with our six children (aged five to 17) who feel passionately Italian despite being half English. When Italy scored the dreaded equaliser they exploded with joy and Carla returned briefly to watch the replays, wrapped in a towel and with her long black corkscrew hair still dripping with water.