What World Cup?

For both England and the USA teams the pox ridden festival of hypocrisy that has been the 2022 World Cup is over. Good riddance. I’m not a great football/soccer fan in any case, but out of sheer patriotism I do usually manage to muster sufficient interest in the England team’s progress through a tournament like this to at least know who we’re playing, and maybe even watch a game down the pub with my mates. This time round I haven’t even gone that far, and I’m not alone.

The sheer disinterest here has been interesting. Seeing how the country as a whole has largely ignored the Woke World Cup. Usually, when England are in a major international tournament like the Word Cup or the Euros you can tell just by walking or driving around. The red and white St George’s Cross flag of England sprouts up all over the place, on private houses, pubs, shops, and attached to lampposts and the like. Unlike the other “Home Nations” merely being in the big tournaments is the rule, rather than the exception for England, but as we get further through a tournament, the more flags come out as the excitement grows.

Of course, the poor souls who are actually addicted to watching the game for its own sake get excited, as you would expect, but for the big events the country as whole usually gets behind the national team. If England get to the quarterfinals (especially if it’s one of our traditional “needle” matches, France, Germany, or more recently Argentina) then you really know something is going on. We lost in the quarterfinal to France last Saturday and you wouldn’t have noticed there was even a match on. Compared to the engaged interest with which the country followed the women’s team through the Euros earlier this year, and the genuine elation that greeted their victory, the men’s progress through the World Cup has been met with a  damp squib. No, that’s not quite accurate, a damp squib would have been an upgrade compared to this.

There has been copious media coverage of the World Cup of course, but the majority of it has not been about the actual football. The politics, whinging, whining, and virtue signalling has overshadowed the sport totally. I think this really has been the cause of the disinterest, not so much because the English people are so morally elevated that they are boycotting a tournament being held in such a questionable country out of principle, more because they are disgusted with their own national team’s hypocrisy and lecturing.

Most folk here are happy to keep politics out of sport. While this World Cup has been going on the England cricket team has been playing (and winning) a test match series against Pakistan, played in Pakistan. We have not been getting all worked up because Pakistan is at least as bad as Qatar when it comes to generally manky cultural/religious based awfulness (and it is). It has not been an issue because the England cricket team have not spent the last few years lecturing the country on racism and “social justice”.

By contrast, the England football team, along with many football commentators and the football establishment, have really come down with a bad case of Wokery. They are STILL kneeling before matches in some bizarre Neo-Marxist ritual associated with the death of a drug addled petty criminal in Minneapolis. When fans express their disapproval of this, they are branded racists. They have also been very vocal about various other issues, not least of which is the apparent need to “kick homophobia out of football”.

This team of moral giants has then happily gone out to a country where gay men can be gaoled for seven years, where women are treated like rubbish and where anywhere from four hundred to six thousand migrant workers have died to build the stadia they are playing in. When they found out the pathetic virtue signalling gesture of wearing a soppy “One Love” armband would cost them a yellow card, they dropped it. Small wonder then, that the English have largely turned their backs on their own team. If England are going to win another World cup in my lifetime, I’m quite pleased it’s not going to be this one.

On the other hand, there are fans in England, and on the Continent, who are supporting their national teams with gusto. On the same night that England went out of the competition, Morocco beat Portugal. There were scenes of “mostly peaceful” confrontation, sorry, celebration, between London’s Metropolitan Police and Moroccan fans in central London, so peaceful that busses needed police wedges to get around Trafalgar Square. Apparently, the celebrations of the much larger Moroccan community in Paris were even more “mostly peaceful” and much more pyrotechnic than the chaotic scenes in London.

Paris celebrating the Moroccan win.

Tonight, Morocco play France for a place in the finals. Usually, I would support more or less anyone against France, naturally. Up until last Saturday I would also have been generally have been quite supportive of Morocco as an underdog, and a good example of a Muslim nation with a long, (relatively) moderate, stable history. The “mostly peaceful” outbursts of emotion both in the capital of my own country and Paris have changed that. I’m not saying I’m supporting France (let’s not lose our grip here) but I’m certainly not supporting Morocco either. A plague on both their houses, say I. And whatever the result, Paris is likely to burn, bits of it anyway.