Colin Sheridan: David Beckham was hiding in plain sight in Qatar

Despite being ubiquitous across sky-scraper length billboards in Doha, Beckham himself was conspicuously hard to find during the tournament, and even harder to hear

EVERYWHERE: A mural of David Beckham near the Khalifa International Stadium, Al Rayyan, Qatar. Pic: Mike Egerton/PA Wire

As a footballer, David Beckham often managed the impossible. He was the first footballer of the television age to develop a “wand of a right foot”, a label previously reserved exclusively for left-footed playmakers. He was impossibly vain at a time when footballers still took baths together and moisturiser was the devil's milk. 

He was impossibly cool, defying haters by wearing sarongs and head-to-toe leather and headscarves and cornrows. He was a gay icon, becoming Brad Pitt in a pair of Predator boots. He often came across as impossibly vacuous, too, as shallow as a puddle, an empty vessel of a man obsessed with self-image, rescued only by being impossibly good at taking free-kicks.