Football in the Desert

The FIFA World Cup lurched into action on Sunday – in front of the worlds gaze and a thinly spread crowd in the Al Bayt Stadium.

The scramble in the weeks running up to the tournament – on the part of brands and organisations – to cleanse their consciences had run its course. Voices of dissent and mutiny had been muted. The corpses of those who have died building all this had been flung out of shot. Qatar was ready (as it ever could be) to welcome the world. Whether the rest of the world are indeed content to be welcomed in is another question. Maybe the answer to that will be determined by how far the Home Nations can get in this tournament?

The smallest country to ever host the World Cup - a country smaller than London – were impatient to get the tournament kicked off, and for good reason too. The Qatari regime would like to have hoped that the action on the field would shadow and eventually bury the action off it. 

It seems many of the Western news outlets have made the very deliberate act to tell the true, bleak story of how ‘The Beautiful Game’ was bound, gagged and and forced to dance for a truly unbeautiful desert wasteland.

Choosing to unravel all the grim tales of deceit and death at the point when viewership would be highest – just over 8 million for the opening ceremony on the BBC – was an effective way to ensure the greatest number of ears could be given the disclaimer to these four weeks of football. Yes, enjoy the football… but let’s not forget the rest.

The autopsy started on Sunday evening before the opening ceremony and first match between hosts Qatar and Ecuador. Watching the pre-match build up from a panel of usually rather beige and unremarkable ex-footballers – felt more like watching Newsnight or a package from the Ten O’ Clock news. Assertive, direct and informative. 

The refusal to ‘roll over’ felt refreshing to see. Especially at a time when the Qatari PR machine must have been working overtime. It was an astute decision by BBC chiefs to redeploy their investigative news journalists onto their sports coverage as well. 

The BBCs Ros Atkins’ scathing report released on-air just as World Cup fever was building, knocked down almost every claim made by the Gulf State. Migrant workers treated fairly? Think again – forced to work under the sun, passports revoked, wage abuse and squalid living conditions. Only three workers deaths, say the authorities. Not quite. The UN state 50. Other reports put it at ‘thousands.’ Qatar’s claims of this being a fully carbon neutral event were dismantled all too easily. And all this as a consequence of bribe payments to FIFA officials right at the start of the nomination process.

Alan Shearer – the masterful bloke of the football cliché – came across more like an Andrew Marr figure than a ‘he’s got to hit the back of the net there’ type pundit. Gary Lineker – again no wordsmith – morphed into a sage preacher of football. His minute-long monologue that raised the curtain on the BBCs World Cup coverage was surprisingly arresting - not a word usually associated with ex-footballers.

But fear not. Do no adjust your sets! For this is the new modern age of football where politics, diplomacy, acts of defiance, markers of allegiance, elite sport and coloured armbands all merge into the strange beast that’ll prance around on our TVs for the next four weeks. Many take annoyance at this mixture.

Are you sick of the moralisation? Shall we just get on with the football now? These were the sorts of questions posed to the public on radio sets and TV panels in the run up to the festivities. All gave varying answers.

Indeed it has split the country and neither side are explicitly wrong. Such as the fury felt by some after the BBC decided not to show the opening ceremony. TalkSPORT’s Simon Jordan asked “how dare the BBC” deprive the taxpayer of the ‘privilege’ of watching the ceremony. Going on to argue that politics and sport should be kept apart. It’s a view held by many. Even the French President, Emmanuel Macron, last week pleaded that “sport should not be politicised.”

Jordan also argued that “people are turning this World Cup into something it shouldn’t be about”. Although his claims could be questioned – his misgivings do lead to an interesting topic. That is who are we to lecture them? What makes the West anymore saintly and moral than the Middle East in our customs and social values?

Besides – all this grovelling will be forgotten once each game kicks off. It was a case of sour irony that England’s World Cup campaign kicked off in a stadium where a British national died building it. 

Yet sport has a magical tendency to blur the mind. I don’t suspect the beer-soaked fan parks will suddenly turn into a chin-scratching, cigar-smoking Gentleman’s Club of political philosophers and diplomats mulling how despicable this World Cup is and how we can ensure it doesn’t happen again.

And in those glints of brilliance - where the ball sits suspended in-flight, kicked from an English boot, where pubs, gardens, living rooms fall deathly quiet until the ball nestles high into the roof of the net – a unique feeling that only a sport like football can quite achieve – will these fan parks stop to remember those who have lost their lives and livelihoods building this great Middle Eastern show. Of course they won’t. And quite rightly too. The crazed goal celebrations will be as crazed as they have been in every World Cup that has gone before it. Again, quite rightly.

If England win or Cymru go far – then those media organisations who went to such great pains to act all ‘Woodward and Bernstein’ before the tournament began - will find themselves in a rather tricky middle ground. Having to balance the unrefined joy and elation that comes with any national sporting triumph, with the duty of care to report on the tragedies, blind eyes and abuses of power that any respected outlet must undertake.

And so the old doctrine of sport may well ring true once more. Sport has a particularly short memory. The corruption and medieval human rights record will want to be brushed aside by the national consciousness in the event of Home Nations glory. 

If Qatar can give the Three Lions an extra star to stitch over their crest, the memory will look back to this blood-soaked tournament with a faint veil of gold draped over it. The pile of turgid entrails from this Qatari World Cup may just shrink into the distance, just to become a little inconvenience when England come to look back on a golden tournament. A slightly guilt-filled chuckle in the pub some years later.

Anyway… Three Lions and all that