One of the advantages of being a very slow writer is that nobody can blame this blog post for the fact that England won't be hosting the 2018 World Cup. Not that I'd be terribly bothered if it did, because nobody ever seemed to have made much of an argument for it in the first place, until suddenly we've got the heir to the throne, the Prime Minister and the man under the most famous haircuts in sport jetting off to Switzerland to claim the credit. Shouldn't at least one of those people have had more important things to deal with? Suddenly the Sun (or at least its English edition) was devoting an entire front page to a rant criticising the BBC for daring to investigate whether anybody in FIFA was corrupt.
Two days later, anyone south of Berwick-upon-Tweed who dared to suggest that anybody at FIFA wasn't corrupt would probably have been beaten with sticks. The more cynical might even have found themselves wondering whether somebody at News International had been tipped off that England weren't going to be the hosts and decided to get their blame in first; after all, if it had been held over here they wouldn't be able to run the usual "BBC Sends People Abroad To Report On Events In Other Countries Shocker" that they usually like when there's some international event. Funnily enough, few seemed brave enough at the time to ask whether it was worth even the legal bribery (in terms of tax relief for sponsors and so forth) in order to host two big sporting events within six years of each other. Mind you, I did hear a rumour that England did quite well in the last tournament that was hosted here... you'd think people would talk about that a bit more.
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