And now, finally, some football. For much of the 12 years since Sepp Blatter’s fumbling fingers ripped open an envelope containing one word and a thousand questions, the 2022 World Cup has been able to exist in our minds as little more than a surreal abstraction. A computer-generated simulation. Some Philip K Dick-infused vision of a future that might never come to pass; that could even somehow be averted if we made the right choices. But the time for daydreaming and denial is over. This is happening. Matty Cash is going to Qatar, and to greater or lesser extents, we’re all going with him.
Why? How? Why here? Why now? And – frankly – what the hell? Just a few of the more intelligible responses to a project that from its grubbily cynical inception has felt like a giant step into a sun-scorched unknown. This is not the first World Cup to be held in the shadow of totalitarianism. It is not the first to be awarded under questionable premises, nor the first to be built at a ruinous expense to the public exchequer and the planet. But in most other respects it is like nothing this sport will ever have seen before.
