For a minute there, we were able to forget the week’s messy business, the Lionel man cleansing our footballing souls on Saturday night with a goal of such exquisite loveliness you could nearly hear your heart sing. Then he and his teammates turned to run to the crowd in celebration and there, lest we forgot, was “Qatar” emblazoned on their shirts.
No getting away from it. Sure, everything’s for sale.
It's weeks like that when you almost feel sorry for folk who have an aversion to football. No matter where they strayed with their remote controls, Fifa was the topic of the day: Prime Time, Tonight With Vincent Browne, Newsnight, Channel 4 News, the lot. And Sky News? Cripes, they nigh on forgot the Queen's speech.
Among the omnipresent commentators was David Ginola, who actually made considerably more appearances on our telly last week than he ever did for France.
Virtuous voice
“Is it a joke?” he asked on ITV when
Sepp Blatter
was re-elected, although, not to be unkind, Ginola being the first name on telly’s Virtuous Voices of Football team sheet was a bit funny in itself. You know, him being the fella who was paid £250,000 by a bookmaker to run against Blatter in a publicity stunt, withdrawing two weeks later after a less than sparkling launch when he couldn’t name a single member of Fifa’s executive committee.
Was he worth it? You decide.
Still, he was treated like a very serious voice on the issue, which was a bit odd, but at least, to his credit, Ginola never wrote an article headlined "Brainless, Betraying, Cretinous", attacking the BBC for a Panorama investigation in to Fifa shenanigans a few years back, as the Observer reminded us yesterday. That was the one that described the corporation as "unpatriotic" because the programme was aired days before England's 2018 World Cup hosting bid was being voted on. In the end, ironically enough, the programme hinted at why England's 2018 World Cup bid proved as successful as the nation's efforts since 1966 to win the thing.
Jake Humphrey, alas, didn't get around to asking Ian Wright if he stood by that Sun column of his when they chatted briefly about the Fifa business on BT Sport ahead of the FA Cup final, but Wrightie and his fellow panellists were as one: somefink has to change.
And then there was Michel Platini, who was on our Sky News screen almost as often as Kay Burley, his press conference aired live from start to finish, being sold to us as the anti-Blatter, possibly the man to save football's soul. This is the same Platini who voted for Qatar to host the World Cup, and, soon after, as luck would have it, saw his son appointed as chief executive of a Qatar-owned sports company. He did, though, deny that Sunday Times claim that he'd received a Picasso painting from Russia in return for voting for them to host the 2018 World Cup, so that was something.
And remember Richard Keys, the former Sky Sports man? He was busy scoffing at those estimates of how many construction workers have died in Qatar while working on World Cup projects: "Been doing some checking: 3,500 workers on five stadia sites, six million hours worked, no fatalities." He should know: he now works for Qatari broadcasting network BeIn Sports, and lives in the sheikhdom.
Raking it in
A bit quieter through the week, though, were all those retired footballers who’ve been raking it in as ambassadors for Qatar 2022 ever since the sheikhdom, somehow, held off their challengers to host the competition. Perhaps they were busy on yet more all-expenses-paid trips to Doha to see the good work being done by the “Supreme Committee for Delivery and Legacy”, tours that presumably don’t include viewings of the coffins of World Cup immigrant workers.
Auld Sepp, then, hasn’t walked the walk alone; he’s been a generous president, ensuring it’s been a very inclusive party. So, when he barked “Let’s go, Fifa!” at the end of his victory speech, there were probably more than a few of our favourite football folk fist-bumping their tellies back home. No one wants to be a party-pooper, after all.
