GETTING ONE’s KICKS ELSEWHERE

Perplexingly, thousands of people seem to be travelling around the country promoting syphilis …

Like many others, I greeted the end of another season of football last month with relief but now I discover that we are in for even more of the wretched stuff than ever from this weekend onwards and, if the team representing England manage to progress past the first rubber, for weeks thereafter. I read that England’s opening match is against the USA and, as a student of history, I happen to know that the same nation’s then team defeated England in the same cup sixty years ago. Then, as now, England and her apologists presented themselves in a miasma of hubris and richly deserved to be taken down several dozen pegs. Like all thoughtful people, I shall be fervently hoping for a repeat of that result. With luck, Master Rooney will be sent off for calling one of his opponents a despicable cad.

Whatever else the South African World Cup will be, it will certainly be a festival of cliché. Which dumb and exhausted phrase will win the ultimate prize, I wonder? Look out for “a rasping shot”, always an impenetrable favourite among commentators. But I would put folding money on “44 years of hurt” as combining the proper level of hyperbole with the appropriate overlay of surrealism. This phrase refers to the fact that England last won the Jules Rimet trophy on home soil in suitably controversial circumstances in 1966 and has not come notably close to winning since. It isn’t so much “hurt” that is the problem; by any criterion, it’s a combination of incompetence and inflated expectation.


Matt in last weekend's Telegraph

The fact is that Britain doesn’t invest remotely sufficient resources in the game at grass roots level to have any prospect of bringing on world-beating native players a decade from now. Half a dozen of the premier league teams are potentially richer than any comparable businesses in the world because of the wealth drawn from television rights, yet they are impoverished by asset-stripping foreign owners and grotesquely inflated rates of pay offered to players, the majority of whom do not qualify to play for this country.

That England’s prospects are objectively so poor doesn’t deter anyone, especially those seeking to cash in, from talking up the notion that England “can” win. (It always seems to me a fake argument; of course England “can” win because they are playing. Aberbaijan can’t, because they’re not). Last time, at the outset of the competition, Radio Times ran a mock-up of the England players, topped by David Beckham, flourishing the trophy. At least the editor (so far, at any rate) has had the basic sense not to repeat this absurdity.

Whenever “Ingerland” (as the fans evidently chant it) plays in one of these international tourneys, thousands of men with unusually small willies buy pairs of massively expensive flags of St George (no doubt stitched for next to nothing by starving peasants in the Far East) and attach them to their otherwise unremarkable motor vehicles, from which said flags flap in the breeze like wounded birds.

On a previous occasion when Ingerland were playing in one of these continuously hyped events, a friend and his son came to lunch and then asked to be permitted to watch “the match” on our television that afternoon. The son (a grown-up) was wearing an Ingerland shirt, though he lives in South Africa and is indeed half South African (his father is wholly South African but of East European Jewish origin). We reluctantly concurred on condition that we were not required to enter the television room for the duration.


Rooney: "cad"

Ingerland were playing Portugal. I didn’t have the heart to point out to the son that he was in fact wearing the favour of the patron saint of Portugal. St George has enjoyed this status in Portugal rather longer than he has in Ingerland. “Säo Jorge” was a Portuguese battle cry as early as the first half of the 14th century. George’s origins are disputed: some sources say he was born in what is now Turkey, others Israel or Palestine or that he may have been Lebanese. At any rate, it seems unlikely that he ever came to Wembley or was what I understand is termed a “Man U” fan.

The flying of George’s flag – a very simple thin, red cross horizontally laid on a white ground – indicates that the team is unquestioningly supported by the owner of the car (or indeed of the house for, as at Yule, otherwise ugly and depressing houses are now festooned with flags and bunting). What none of these unthinking buffoons considers is that, Portugal aside, there are many other communities and causes to which George is patron and therefore to which, unwittingly, they are attaching their reputations. In Brazil – like Portugal, a potential rival for Ingerland in the imminent tourney – George is quite as hallowed a saint as Sebastian. George is also the patron saint of Georgia, of Slovenia, of Moscow, of Beirut, of North Ossetia, of Milan and several other Italian cities, of Aragon, of Kerala, of Gozo and of Malta. There are St George’s Day celebrations in Canada, Belgium, Palestine, Serbia, Bulgaria and Catalonia.


The Jules Rimet trophy: but the players would rather have the cash

The Boy Scouts have George as their patron saint. He also gives his blessing to farmers and agricultural workers, shepherds and sheep and butchers; to horses and horsemen, cavalry and saddle-makers; to soldiers, knights, archers and armourers; and to leprosy, plague and skin diseases. Oh … and to herpes and syphilis. Clap for George!