Why you should support your local club and prove football is worth fighting for after England 2018 farce

By Michael Calvin

Published 23:02 04/12/10

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There will always be an England.

It is no country for ­football’s old men, geriatric gang ­bosses engorged by the ­Viagra of power.

It is a place where disgust is quickly distilled into ­defiance.

Where, despite its faults, there is still a starkly defined sense of right and wrong.

The charade of the World Cup vote went beyond ­contempt for presidents, princes and Prime ­Ministers.

It changed everything ­because the principles it challenged are so basic.

Sepp Blatter’s death head stare invited revulsion, ­retribution and ­retrenchment.

It hardened opinion, ­completed a cycle of ­disillusion.

International football no longer matters to the ­majority, mortally offended by the buying power of the Russian rouble and Qatari Riyal.

It has mutated from an ­irritation to an irrelevance, from an embellishment to an embarrassment.

The England team, pimped and paraded from Trinidad to Thailand, has been treated like a superannuated sex slave.

The England players are as out of touch with the ­common man as the husks of humanity in embroidered blazers, who piggyback on their celebrity status. The clubs, their paymasters, resent the intrusion, but will come to regret their ­perceptions of infallibility.

The Premier League is part of the problem, not the ­solution.

Richard Scudamore, its chief executive, is not that different to the cockroaches who infest FIFA’s glass-fronted mansion.

He has infinitely higher moral standards, which isn’t difficult. But he, too, sees everything through the prism of self ­interest.

His support for the bid was an authentic Audley Harrison Experience. For all the bluff and bluster, when the bell sounded he didn’t bother to land a punch.

He talked airily – some would say smugly - of the best revenge being served cold, by products of ­Premier League academies winning the World Cup in Moscow.

It suited his agenda. He’s a natural empire builder, who will not be content until the FA is responsible for little more than ­shuffling paper clips.

It helps that he has only invisible men like Roger ­Burden to overcome. Burden provided some much-needed light relief with the simpering withdrawal of his candidacy to be the new FA chairman.

It was the first recorded ­example of a mouse leaving a sinking ship.

He no longer trusts FIFA, apparently. Someone had better whisper that Father Christmas doesn’t exist, and the moon is not made of cheese.

Meanwhile, anonymous politicians promised a Government inquiry into the dysfunctional ­domestic game.

Other opportunists, like Ken Bates, harvested easy headlines with demands to breakaway from Blatter & Co.

The prospect enticed the chattering classes, but missed the point.

In time, humiliation will be redefined.

It will expose the lie that England’s global stature ­demands that major ­sporting events be collected, like a schoolgirl’s trinkets.

It will highlight the lunacy of spending £15million on a World Cup bid led by a well meaning marketing man and a media monkey.

It will remind us of the ­obscenity of FIFA using the World Cup to take £2billion from an impoverished land like South Africa.

It will focus on the folly of spending nearly £10bn on an Olympic Games that leaves no long term legacy.

It will remind us of the ­simple pleasures of a game that still has the power to entrance.

Do yourself a favour. ­Remember your first thought when you heard the news from Zurich.

Trust your instincts. Don’t play their game, by being a Premier League tourist.

Support your local club through the cold snap, value allegiances passed down as family heirlooms.

Prove that football is worth fighting for, and that ­England is a green and pleasant land.

Once the snow clears, of course.

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