Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Will England pull out of the World Cup?

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I wonder if the moral guardians of our country — the England football team — intend to participate in the 2022 World Cup in Qatar? Most of the players are currently kicking their heels (and presumably missing) in such places as the Turks and Caicos Islands, so they have plenty of time for rumination. Having become, in the words of their manager, a ‘beacon of light’ within a country of savages and bigots, it will be interesting to see if their moral stance extends to boycotting a tournament which is to be held in a totalitarian slave state that outlaws homosexuality and isn’t entirely up to speed on the issue of women.

Further — graft, corruption and greed were among the reasons why Qatar was chosen in the first place. So will the England team shelve their ideals, or will they perhaps take the knee in remembrance of the Indian workers who died making the stadium in which they are playing? That, I suppose, would be the preferred option: more meaningless virtue-signalling. Pulling out of the World Cup would be, I think, the appropriate decision. But they don’t want to do that, do they?

‘If not now then when?’

I assume that the shroud of bogus sanctimony which enveloped them throughout the Euros will follow them all the way to Doha. We have just witnessed a confected hysteria, with the BBC News — followed by most of the press — leading its bulletins on the appalling racist abuse England’s black players received after the team’s fairly dire performance in the final against the Italians. The BBC continued to lead on the story even after one of its own programmes, Newsnight, reported that it could find only five proven instances of British people sending those horrible messages. The majority of the posts apparently came from abroad, from rogue agents who banked on the stupidity of the left and the media in swallowing the whole caboodle.

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