Trophy tales

The World Cup, and once again people who don’t watch football from one quadrennium to the next manifest an interest in all those surreal pairings: Ecuador v. Poland, Iran v. Mexico, Togo v. Switzerland. I (and many others) have been disobliging about John Motson in the past, but he is perfect for these events, assuming no prior knowledge in his listeners, making you half-imagine that every match is the first he has ever attended. ‘Nice move!’; ‘Oh, Lampard there’; ‘England finding themselves on the back foot now…’

Real football aficionados hate all this wide-eyed simplicity; they get cross, just as trainspotters would at Crewe if crowds of housewives elbowed them off the platform. The true fan, the man who can see past the vanity of mere results, is Alan Hansen, a commentator who makes Eeyore sound like Mr Cheeryble. When England beat Paraguay he told viewers: ‘It was bitty. It was disjointed.