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.

But generally speaking, the much bigger corruption in club football is the soul-corroding kind which has been exemplified at Manchester City over the past 14 months, previously at Chelsea, and admittedly at United three years ago.

This corruption is not necessarily illegal, per se. No, it is a moral and spiritual corruption, as a few of the more thoughtful commentaries have noted this past week in the wake of the Wastelands detonation, as football surrenders like so many industries before it to the power of foreign global capitalists, and now, dangerously, to foreign sovereign funds. A superb ranting piece foretelling the future by veteran hack Mike Calvin in London’s Sunday Mirror sums it up well, and I urge you to go have a look.

Forgive the “capering camera-junkies in tea-towels”, as Calvin memorably describes the Blue loons in City’s carpark last week; they apparently know not what they do. Not least as our capacity for self-delusion remains endless — you can bet your bottom petrodollar the (ex) Bitters will still sing “Ci-ty… we’re from Manchester” on Saturday with not a trace of irony, inside a club now totally owned by a grisly invading foreign state.

We’re all on the fast-track now to Franchise World, total deracination and once-noble competitions becoming mere bagatelles, literally rich men’s playthings par excellence. They may well love the future in Bangkok, Shanghai and the trendier bits of LA. But in Salford, and Ardwick, and even the Old Kent Road, they will slowly turn away from the turnstiles, and then the screens, before chalking it up as — like the Imperial Docks or the Wearside shipyards or a smoke with yer pub pint — another lost centrepiece of the working man’s existence. Bah humbug.

Still, I’ll say one thing for last week’s extraordinary events: it certainly put the bloody Olympics back in its box.

Three weeks of public schooled chinless wonders in rowing boats being hailed as ‘heroes’ — at a time Britain is fighting two wars, natch — had certainly wound up many a football fan, and the way the ‘real’ sporting nation gleefully fell upon the new football season’s stunning opening restored some faith in our national sense of perspective. And so despite all the gloom above, I join with every other Red in simply gagging for this coming weekend: the longed-for Berbatov debuting for United at Anfield, with Liverpool Gerrard-free, and then City versus Chelsea for the unofficial Plutocrats’ Plate which, let us admit it, utterly fascinates even as it appalls and disgusts.

Therein’s the ruddy rub: if we want to stop the near-future madness ruining everything we held dear, then those lads in Salford and Ardwick have to start turning away from it now. Could you? No: me neither. And next week we’ll be blathering here about goals and players and trophies as ever. So meanwhile, figuratively come with me to stand outside the pub for a smoke, and to down eight pints to drown the consequent self-loathing.

By Richard Kurt, whose “Red Army Years” is only available via [e-mail]