SOMEBODY NEEDS TO COME TO AMERICA:

Oh, how I hate the Beautiful Game (Craig Brown, 28/06/2008, Daily Telegraph)

How I hate the Beautiful Game! I hate its cry-baby players and its gruff, joyless managers, its blokish supporters and its sinister owners, its whistle-peeping referees and its chippy little linesmen, its excitable commentators and - perhaps most of all - its unpluggable "analysts". I hate its imbecilic chanting and its self-righteous saloon-bar expertise. I hate its ersatz working-classness, especially now that the price of tickets compares unfavourably with Royal Ascot or Henley. I have even begun to hate those pampered little kiddies the footballers are now obliged to escort on to the pitch before the start of each game, as though all set to embark on a pervy kind of waltz.

Above all, I hate its inescapability. Honk! Honk! Even in a pretty street on a quiet night in Brussels, it was impossible to escape it. Back in our hotel bar, we were confronted by five screens, all showing endless slow-motion replays of failed goals interspersed with furrow-browed trainers and self-pitying footballers. On screen, a succession of experts and analysts and commentators all jabbered away; meanwhile, in the bar itself, Americans and Belgians and Dutch and English exchanged their equally forceful and self-confident opinions as to where things had gone wrong, and how they personally would have made them go so much better.

It is hard being a football loather, a football unfan. I sometimes feel as lonely as the sole survivor in the last reel of a Zombie film, as, one by one, old friends reveal themselves, with their glassy stares and outstretched arms, to have succumbed to the lure. People you had always assumed were salt-of-the-earth anti-soccer stalwarts suddenly start jabbering incoherently about how Cornelius from Aston Villa should be shot for that tackle by Aldomovar of Tottenham Hotspur and, from the look of them, you suddenly realise that all is lost.