It pains me to say this but I don’t think we’ve got a scoobies of getting the World Cup not now our friends in the media have blown the cover of some of our esteemed colleagues at FIFA. I was only talking to the FIFA representative from Burkina Faso the other day, over lunch in the Danglers Club. You’d probably be surprised to hear that Burkina Faso has a FIFA representative but not only that, this gent (who I won’t name) is one of the key power brokers in the land of cheese and cuckoo clocks. Somehow he managed to crawl up Ol’ Slop Bladders arse around 1989 and hasn’t come out since. He took great delight in telling myself and Alan Windgust of the FA that Burkina Faso doesn’t even have any proper football pitches. And Slop saw this as a plus and so gave our man a place at the big trough! Well, Al Windgust was deeply shocked at this, poor fellow.

But I digress. Being the reluctant patriotic that I am, I have to confess I answered the call from Biffa Girling and my chums at the FA to try and redeem the situation, which quite frankly is dire. So I started with one of Slop’s pet committee men and moved onto some of the more exalted trough-grazers that haunt the corridors of world football. Like I told Terry Tappin, it’s a dirty job but someone has to do the Brian Clough.

Anyway, two hours later, after various grubby little notes had passed between myself and Mr Burkina Faso across the table cloth, we agreed a price satisfactory to all, for his vote to go to England and Al and I took off in a cab to the Old Chisellers club to meet up with the king shark himself, the doyen of the brown envelope, the man who has no shame, Jack Warner of the Trinidad & Tobago FA. In the cab I tried to explain to Al Windgust how some jumped up travel agent from a group of Caribbean islands which don’t even have a proper league got to be a kingpin at FIFA. He couldn’t quite grasp that it’s much easier for Slop Bladder to have a coterie of nonentities from insignificant FAs on his committee who are entirely dependent on him for their jollies and so he can wield his evil wand as and when he likes.

Unluckily for us Jack had brought a team of his own hangers own and it took me half an hour and three bottles of Chateauneuf Du Pape to prize him away from his guzzling, sycophants. I’ve met Joke Warner (as he’s known to the cognescenti) many times before and always marvelled at the brass neck of the man. I’ll never forgot the site of him shoveling chicken vol-au-vents into his mouth in industrial proportions at one Champions League shin-dig, so much so that he ran over and took one right off the plate of a Russian delegate who almost fainted with shock.

Needless to say, both he and I knew why we were here, so pretty soon we got down to details on how I was to grease his greasy palms with FA lucre. After we’d danced around his first exhorbitant figure, he without shame, delved into his back pocket and withdrew a short but weighty list of ‘favours’ which could be offset against a smaller cash figure. Not once did he mention the current media brouhaha that’s pointing the figure at him for flogging tons of World Cup tickets. I got the impression he didn’t give a toss. And why should he, Slop will always be there to protect him.

An hour later we clinched the deal, which involved promises of all kinds of shopping trips to Selfridges, John Lewis’s and Fortnum and Mason courtesy of the FA, plus a sizeable wedge, and Al and I departed, exhausted, into the night.

When I got home I had to lie down for half an hour. Being exposed to such concentrated skulduggery is not healthy and I only regained my composure after a stiff G&T and a hot bath. But there you go, such is the burden of patriotism. I was going to say, I doubt, after all that, we will get the World Cup. Jack Warner and his cronies will be stacking up the swag from all the other nations as I write this and goodness only knows how they make their decision but it certainly won’t be on merit. But to be honest, I don’t personally give a stuff. The last World Cup was like watching paint dry. Give me a cold November Saturday down at the Cottage any day of the week. Chin chin….

Yours

W.R. Howe (Chairman)