The World Cup that’s shamed before it’s even begun – and 1 country that’s to blame | Football | Sport
We can now set our watches for the day on which millions of heads will explode in Britain under the weight of a crippling contradiction. A love of football and an affection for dogs will compete until, finally, fans lie dead in their homes, in our streets and pubs. 2030: the year our brains buckled. Why? Because mad Moroccans will have murdered many stray dogs to clean up its streets ahead of hosting the African Cup of Nations and, later, co-hosting the World Cup.
I often see stray dogs on regular visits to a city called Leskovac in southern Serbia. They’re a bit of a worry, because they’re just as cute as the canines we cuddle at home but you’ve no idea what disease or behavioural issues they have waiting to burst out and ruin your holiday. I try to balance my British love of animals with a Londonista aversion to strangers and hope that their obvious suffering doesn’t ruin my night.
What I don’t do is rely on an army of angry Serbs to race around the corner and shoot the poor pup in the head then bundle it into a van.
But let’s say they did. Would that sort of thing disqualify Serbia from hosting the World Cup? Unlikely. Just look at the last two hosts.
Qatar – a sick joke of a state with kamikaze employment conditions that fresh from hosting a moralising competition with a limit on booze ran cover for Jew-killing Hamas operatives living in their hotels.
Russia – a state that months before hosting the competion had poisoned Sergei and Yulia Skripal on UK soil, had four years prior annexed Crimea from Ukraine and invaded Georgia 10 years before its 2018 World Cup.
So the grim fact that Morocco is slaughtering strays will make absolutely no difference.
The Moroccans might even get a pass from the cult of cultural relativity, being an Islamic country. I’ll leave it to potential apologists to contend with the wisdom of whipping out ancient quotes that some interpret as condemning canines.
It’d look very odd for the footballing elites to care about violations of freedom of expression, repression of dissent and the rights of non-heterosexual citizens raised by Amnesty International after pasing the World Cup to Putin, the sponsor of Chechen Republic chief and all-round nutcase Ramzan Kadyrov, who purges and tortures gay people.
What we can be almost certain of is that we English will have to suffer the spectacle of seeing our fans defamed as barbarous hooligans while a country that slaughters one of our favourite animals whinges that we’re a bit much (if we play there).
It’ll be a similar feeling to being looked down on for enoying alcohol by the authorities of a country that treats its women like children (so ran a Guardian headline, not the ramblings of a far-right wrong’un).
Maybe there’ll be some joy to bleed from the irony of fans from one of the most enlightened, tolerant nations on Earth being sneered at by barbarians who butcher dogs.
Perhaps we Brits have it wrong. We may well be the problem. Maybe the middle-class, pseudo-Left view of us football fans is actually right and us rowdy match-goers are a bigger threat to civility than actual gay-bashers, actual misogynists and actual racists.
After all, the Moroccans might be destroying dogs, Russia ravaging sovereign states and Qatar coddling terrorists, but that’s really no excuse for offensive chants.
