Football is not coming home

THE celebratory song has suddenly turned into a funeral dirge: it’s not coming home, it’s not coming home, football’s not coming home…

Forty-four years of hurt on the pitch have been overtaken by, at least, 56 years of hurt in Zurich’s corridors of power.

The consequences of England’s failure to land World Cup 2018 will be like those of their multiple failures to win the World Cup itself since they last hosted and claimed the Jules Rimet in 1966 — recriminations, finger-pointing, political in-fighting and every other grisly manifestation of the blame game, from knee-jerk xenophobia to abject self-loathing.