World cup

[audioplayer src="http://feeds.soundcloud.com/stream/268140526-the-spectator-podcast-brexit-strategy-what-would-the.mp3" title="Toby Young explains his excitement at Euro 2016" startat=1096] Listen [/audioplayer] If you’re a proper football supporter, getting excited about England on the eve of a major tournament is considered uncool. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve tried to engage people in conversation about England’s chances, only to be greeted with a look of bored condescension. ‘I’m not really interested in international football,’ is the inevitable reply. Well, sorry, but I’m pretty fired up about the Euros — although, to be fair, I do conform to the stereotype of the inauthentic, prawn-sandwich-eating fan.

Why do transgendered people need separate toilets? I thought, according to the prevalent orthodoxy, that the new gender they had acquired was every bit as authentic as the one they had jubilantly renounced. So a separate toilet is surely otiose. And not just that, but the suggestion that they might need a separate toilet for micturition through their surgically emended private parts is surely offensive. The Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow, may be in trouble, then, for announcing his intention to install these mysterious receptacles throughout the Palace of Westminster to service the hordes of transgendered workers wandering around with extravagant beehive hairdos and outsize stiletto heels.

My favourite moment in the crisis engulfing football’s governing body, Fifa, came with the intervention of a man called Manuel Nascimento Lopes. Manuel is the Fifa delegate from Guinea-Bissau, an African country which occupies 130th place in the Fifa world rankings but which, far more importantly in this context, punches well above its weight when it comes to institutionalised corruption. Thirteenth in the world, according to the organisation Transparency International — not a bad showing for a smallish sub-Saharan rathole which has been almost permanently engulfed in civil war since the Portuguese got the hell out.

How pleasing that the sleazebags at Fifa are finally getting their comeuppance. We have all known what has been going on for years: dodgy deals in hotels, backhanders to secure votes. Who could disagree with the judgement of Greg Dyke, chairman of the FA when he suggested: 'There is no way of rebuilding trust in Fifa while Sepp Blatter is still there.' If we won’t go, let’s boycott the World Cup until Fifa is governed like, er, our own upstanding football establishment. That’s the problem. Yes, of course Fifa is a fetid pit of corruption, but we can’t exactly claim the moral high ground, not with our own history of bungs, match-fixing scandals and player-rapists.

The grand slam in golf is a feat almost impossible to imagine now. It meant winning all four golfing majors in the same year, and has only been done once, by the extraordinary Bobby Jones in 1930. Jones was awarded a ticker-tape reception in New York, and a golfing writer of the time with a feel for geometry called it ‘The Impregnable Quadrilateral’, a fortress that could never be taken. Jones, a lawyer by profession and unimpeachably honourable in his play, was a canny young man as well as a remarkable player: he had backed himself for the grand slam at the start of the year with a British bookmaker at 50-1. He eventually collected $60,000, or getting on for $11 million today. Who wouldn’t look forward to popping down to Ladbrokes to pick up a slice of that?

Graeme Swann arrived late for the last cricket World Cup. His wife had given birth before the tournament and he was given leave to miss the warm-ups and just arrive for the first match. No need to worry: it was only the Netherlands, the competition’s weakest side. Naturally England nearly lost it, but Swann took two wickets. At the press conference, Swann was asked about leaving his new baby son. ‘I’m sure he’ll give me shit in the future for missing the first two months of his life,’ he said, ‘and I’ll reply: sorry son, I had to go and help England beat the Dutch.’ England have made a habit of being embarrassed by the Dutch.

Mark Steyn once wrote of the United Nations: ‘It’s a good basic axiom that if you take a quart of ice-cream and a quart of dog feces and mix ’em together the result will taste more like the latter than the former. That’s the problem with the U.N.’ It’s a maxim that works double for Fifa, world football’s governing body, which has just cleared future World Cup hosts Qatar and Russia of any wrongdoing but managed to criticise the FA. The BBC reports: ‘As for Russia, they have also been cleared, although the report noted its bid team made “only a limited amount of documents available for review”.

Next time you read about an auctioneer’s gavel coming down on a $150 million painting bought by some flunkey representing the ruling family of Qatar, don’t ooh or aah, but think of those monsters in Iraq and Syria who have their children pose on video while holding up the severed heads of innocents. And no, it’s not a stretch — without Qatar’s gold Islamic State would not exist, not even in the movies. Let me put it another way: had Calvin Coolidge or Herbert Hoover given White House dinners for Al Capone, the outcry would have been heard all the way down to Patagonia.

Yes, alright. It turns out that Germans are pretty good at football. But they aren't quite so good at everything, as our Barometer column this week points out. Here are some things Germans aren’t very good at: Making reliable car engines. According to a survey by Warranty Direct last year, Audi came bottom, BMW seventh from bottom and Volkswagen ninth from bottom out of 36 manufacturers for engine failures. Making love. According to a spurious website survey of 15,000 women in 2009, German men were the world’s worst lovers, the main complaint being that they were ‘smelly’. (Englishmen were second worst.) Cricket. But they are not the worst.

The best team won, and the best two teams reached the final. This is a comparatively rare event at a world cup. And it was a fine world cup in general, with plenty of things to gladden the heart – the hammering of Spain by the Netherlands, the hammering of Brazil by Germany, the eviction at stage one of teams who think too highly of themselves, the emergence of doughty underdogs (Iran, Ghana, Chile, Costa Rica). The Netherlands remain an enigma; they are either wonderfully fluent or suddenly turn into England. But their record, for a country with a fifth of our population, is excellent.

If you’re walking through any built-up area in England between 8 and 10pm this Sunday and you hear a cheer you can be pretty sure it means one thing – Germany have scored yet again. One of the great myths we were fed as children in the 1980s and ‘90s was that the English don’t like the Germans, and in particular the living representatives of all things Teutonic on earth, the German national football team. We love ‘em, and I imagine most English people will be supporting Germany on Sunday. I remember being stuck in the countryside in 2006 and watching the Argentina-Germany quarter-final in a pub; the place went wild when Germany equalised and then won.

Sorry – bit of an interregnum in the World Cup diary, caused principally by England’s pathetic capitulation. But still the tournament gives pleasure, perhaps to a greater degree than it has done in thirty years or more. Watching Brazil get stuffed on their own midden heap was an enormous pleasure. Their thuggery in the previous round, against Colombia, came back to haunt them; there is karma in football. That’s why Leeds Utd are still in the lower reaches of the Championship.  Germany were magnificent; Brazil gave in after the second goal — but truth be told, they were never terribly good. One thing bothers me, though — at the start of these games the opposing players are horribly matey and affectionate to one another.

I’ve been cheering for the Dutch as a sort of thank-you for them humiliating Spain. But there was something thoroughly unpleasant about the way they dispatched Mexico, the world’s great footballing under-achievers. The fairly horrible, if undoubtedly talented, Arjen Robben dived for the penalty which won the game. It may have been a foul, of a sort – although I don’t think so, and mere contact should never be enough to warrant a foul – but whatever, the bald Dutchman dived, and should have been booked. Previously, toothless Uruguay had deservedly lost to Colombia: we are beginning to understand just how utterly shite England were, no? England bottom of a group in which the triumphant top two all go out in the next round (probably).

What a fabulously boring England performance. I watched it only because I had this to write and now feel resentful towards you, which is unfair. Because I don’t suppose you want to hear anything about it, really. The inquest into our national team’s appalling performance at this World Cup (“I couldn’t have asked for any more from the players” – ©Roy Hodgson, every game. Well in which case, mate, you’re the wrong bloke for the job.) has of course already begun. It is being said that Woy has been given an easy ride – which is a way, I suppose, of not giving him one. But when we look for the reasons it’s worth remembering this.

Still going on, is it, the World Cup? There have been some fine games and some poor games with surprisingly thrilling conclusions. Ronaldo, with possibly the worst haircut I have seen on a human being ever, provided a wonderful chipped cross for Portugal to equalise against the USA; neither team, one suspects will trouble the big boys and I doubt the Portuguese will get out of the group. Good! Russia may also fail to do so and have been exactly as boring as Russia always are when it comes to the final stages of a World Cup. Belgium, meanwhile, look rather less menacing than all the experts suggested they would be.