From Russia with love? No chance of that

EVERYBODY loves to quote George Orwell’s much-redacted line about sport being ‘war minus the shooting’. Why read the entire essay when you can find all the zingers online, right? If you can focus your attention long enough to Orwell’s great takedown of all sport, you’ll find that he reserved a special disdain for football — which he described as ‘a game in which everyone gets hurt and every nation has its own style of play which seems unfair to foreigners’. And some people still think this summer’s World Cup in Russia is an opportunity to build bridges between the host nation and the UK? Well, we are sending some of our finest ambassadors... the England fans. Assuming they make bail following their weekend affray in Amsterdam. The tournament should never have gone to Russia, of course. Hosting rights should have been removed long ago. With FIFA running the United Nations a close second in its hand-wringing inactivity when confronted with powerful bullies, however, there was never any chance of that actually happening. At a time when diplomats on both sides are being given the bum’s rush straight to the next flight home, then, there are obvious security concerns surrounding one Home Nation’s involvement in the tournament. Perhaps Orwell had the right idea when, in his sign-off to a piece inspired by Dynamo Moscow’s acrimonious 1945 tour of Britain, he argued that the UK should not send a team to the then-USSR for a return visit. He wrote: ‘If we must do so, then let us send a second-rate team which is sure to be beaten...’ Well, it’s a thought.