Frankly, this World Cup is the most exhausting thing you can do without getting off the couch.

For anyone who loves the game, it is this — more than the alleged bribery, the disruption to the football calendar, the paid-for fans or the expensive beer — which provokes distaste toward Qatar 2022. Most reasonable football people have struggled to know how they should feel as the tournament drew closer.

Very few of us are calling the plays or pointing to the posts. Mostly we are holding tackle bags or heaving others into position, small parts of a greater machine

Maybe it is all pointless, this middle-aged trudge around city streets, grinding your joints into bonemeal and for what?

There's a broader feeling that Manchester United has finally copped itself on

What links Jurgen Klopp and the various loo-lahs wading onto a GAA field bent on dishing out rough justice?

In that moment the players were daft young lasses embarking on a celebratory bender, by the morning they were national figures burdened by responsibility.

Still, even by the standards of the contemporary news cycle, staging an event typically predicated on the weather being quite chilly in one of the world’s most notably toasty nations should raise an eyebrow.

What is missing? Is it simply experience, the nous to ride out the interstellar collisions that are a hazard of international football’s rarefied orbit?

Countless academic theses have been written on how crowds at sporting events engage in collective hysteria. Royal events may generate inexplicable outbreaks of emotion, but nothing compared to the average county final