World Cup fever has arrived. Every morning on the way to work, more little plastic flags of St George flutter from white vans or, in my case, from the window of our trusty Audi A6. Many of my fellow countrymen regard this footie orgy as wholly unnecessary — not me.
Bunting will go up at the front of our house if we advance to the quarters, whereupon my wife will spend most evenings in a curry house with a girlfriend, leaving me to invite the lads round for random games such as Honduras v. Ecuador. Result.
More than anything, the tournament offers a chance to wheel out my one Roy Hodgson (he’s the England manager) anecdote. It was back in 1994 when he was coach of Switzerland and about to take his team to the World Cup in America, for which England did not qualify.
I was working at the Sunday Telegraph at the time and was dispatched to Zurich to write about Sepp Blatter, who was doing a terrific job scaling the greasy pole on his way to becoming Fifa’s disastrous head honcho. Interview over, I spotted Mr Hodgson in the lobby of Fifa’s swanky HQ and introduced myself.
Thinking I might get a piece along the lines of ‘Here’s one Englishman who is going to the World Cup’ and noticing that it was almost 1 p.m., I asked if I could buy him lunch.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I’ve got meetings all day. But I could do tomorrow.’
We met at a plush hotel and he could not have been more charming. We talked football during the starters and broadened things out for the main course to include women priests, the novels of Philip Roth and his experience as a PE teacher at Alleyn’s, the independent school in south London.
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