Olympics? Internationals? Can we get back to what matters?

ANOTHER week annoyingly lost to lumbering internationals blundering about comes thankfully to a close — and this time it was even more of an absurdity than usual, in light of the stunning revelations in an excellent new book about match fixing, including at the 2006 World Cup.

Never has the futility of these painfully tedious qualifying affairs been better illuminated.

Declan Hill has devoted four years to exposing how Asian betting syndicates have become a ‘gangrene’ on the game, and the continental press duly went to town on it — whilst Britain’s media hurried past with barely a word. Funny, that. A cynic might be tempted to think this could have something to do with the rampant conflicts of interest and general incestuousness at large in Britain’s media/football nexus, mightn’t he? Of course, one hastens to concede that club football is most certainly not immune from such corruption either; Hill’s book also details tampering across the continent which, though only rarely visible at the very top level, is clearly hugely disturbing.