Qatar or Catarrh

Qatar?


Qatar?

You’re shitting me, right? Qatar.

Forget investigating the sachems of FIFA for corruption, I recommend opening a full-blow drug investigation. Team Sepp Blatter must be smoking or snorting something to have come up with a brace of lame-brained decisions for the 2018 and 2022 sites for the World Cup…or should I write World Cup™?

I cannot add to the deluge of vitriol pouring from our normally stiff-upper-lipped cousins across the pond. England, home of the best professional football league in the world, and also home to savvy, world-traveling fans is as perplexed at the anointing of Russia as we are over…Qatar.

The country has a smaller population than San Diego, a mere digit of land blessed only by the presence of a shitload of oil, with summer temperatures in excess of 110° F, 44° C. Qatar is supposedly a very rich country. How rich can it be when it can’t even afford a U? When Mr. Blatter pulled the note card out of the envelope to make the formal announcement, the head of Qatar delegation was as shocked as the rest of us, raising his eyebrow in wonder. Not eyebrows, his one eyebrow.

Qatar’s football team has never qualified for the tournament, and hosting the Cup may be the only way they will ever qualify.

Qatar already boasts the highest per capita carbon emissions of any country in the world. (Fact: you can look it up.) The country must build stadiums and additional infrastructure to accommodate the sporting festival. Solar technology will cool the stadium and promoters claim these stadiums will be carbon neutral.

My arse.

Sepp Blatter, the same nattering nabob (sorry, Spiro) who refused to allow goal cameras for the World Cup, has shown his fondness for lucre and his total disdain for the football fan. While Mr. Blatter will arrive in a private jet and be driven to a limousine to a air-conditioned private box, the average fan will struggle to enter the country, find a place to stay, and melt while trudging to the as-yet non-existent venues. Most sports barons are brain-dead and blind to the plight of the fans who actually spend the money that fuels their sport’s respective popularity. Blatter is in a class all his own.

Americans are always derided as not being a football (soccer) friendly nation. Even the minority of us who are fans of the beautiful game far outstrip, as a total, the populations of most other countries. And the passion for the game has been building in the States, witness the excitement during the 2010 Cup, where, despite the time zone issues, the United States national team games drew tremendous interest.

We may be a naïve, young country, but we can smell a rat. The fix was in. Shame on FIFA.

I suggest that we now turn to one of national treasures, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, who with a bit of versifying, can lead us into a promised land of boycotting the 2022 World Cup.

A tip of hat to my mate, Tim Wheatcroft, late of Nottingham for the loan of the homonym catarrh.