A shame World Cups are no longer what they used to be

WALLCHART up: Check. The month’s social diary cleared: Check (didn’t take long). TV strategically placed within view of work desk to give appearance of continued toll while actually watching all group games: Check. It’s World Cup time!

It feels like poor taste to get excited in any way about an event which has already been derided as ill-timed, unwelcome and downright uncivil.

Yet it’s England. And Wales. In a World Cup. Why can’t these things just be like they used to?

Qatar 2022 is a tournament which should have taken place five months ago, yet couldn’t as temperatures in the Middle East would have endangered players’ lives.

No, we couldn’t possibly have let players kick a ball around in that sort of heat. That sort of temperature is only really suited to building massive all-seated, air-conditioned stadia by migrant workers who are probably used to it anyway. Sigh.

Set aside the rights of construction workers who probably aren’t used to having anyone actually stick up for them or their conditions, and you’ve still got the issue of a tournament going to a nation in which women don’t have the same status as men and LGBTQ+ activity is illegal.

Only last week, an ambassador for the World Cup, Khalid Salman, said homosexuality was ‘damage in the mind’ in an interview with German TV, which the Qatari government has not yet publicly criticised.

Yet the idea of sportswashing, and allowing the sort of Stone Age attitudes which still exist in these places to be sprinkled across the world so other women-hating gay-bashers can feel less uncomfortable (it’s free speech!) is apparently now fine. Provided you have the backing of the FIFA executive.

I remember when World Cups were held in Italy (1990), the USA (1994), France (1998) and jointly Japan and South Korea (2002).

Now it’s rainforest-clearers Brazil (2014), Ukraine-invaders Russia (2018) and now bigoted Qatar.

You can’t help wonder where will be next.

North Korea? Afghanistan? Chances are David Beckham will be flogging World Cup merchandise as soon as Pyongyang gets the call (he is also among the ambassadors for Qatar 2022).

Sadly, it’s no different from our domestic clubs, who are owned by the likes of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Even Sepp Blatter, who is hardly the sort of person you would think of as being the world’s moral compass, has said Qatar should not have got the World Cup. It was that Michel Platini who voted for it, he claimed. Hmmm.

Current FIFA president Gianni Infantino has tried to tell football associations across the world to ‘stick to football’, yet England boss Gareth Southgate, to his credit, has said that his players are entitled to have their say, and that he would not be silenced over such matters.

Such is the outrage over the issue that it will only take one heavyhanded policeman, or the arrest of a gay rights activist, or something worse, for the football to be entirely overshadowed.

There are some quiet, considered arguments that we, as Western nations, should not be expecting the world to stick to our values. There is also the binary alternative view that by including such nations in our sporting events, they will somehow learn how wrong they were and change, which is as patronising as it is incorrect.

I am not saying I have the answers (don’t scoff ) but it would be nice to be able to focus on the sport in one of these sporting events. Even the row over the vuvuzelas in the 2010 tournament was preferable. Anyway, what time is kick-off again?