my nerves are bad to-night

As part of English football’s ongoing commitment to self-parody, I should like Carlos Tevez to resurrect his baby’s dummy goal celebration next time Manchester City play Liverpool. Between that and Luis Suárez running around biting people, the pitch would resemble a giant nursery. Ideally, half-time would see the ground staff lay out lots of foam mats on the pitch, and players would be given a cup of milk and told to lie down on one of them for a nap.

The supernanny figure in all of this, of course, would be David Cameron, whose inevitable intervention into the Suárez nonsense this week read like another wrong answer to cult cartoon strip You Are The Prime Minister.

The best thing you can say about Cameron’s contribution is that it didn’t set a precedent. That precedent, naturally, was set by his predecessor-but-one. In seeking to pinpoint the exact moment prime ministerial perspective was irretrievably lost, many will cite the time Tony Blair went on Richard and Judy and called for the then England manager Glenn Hoddle to quit (I shall leave it to more eminent theologians than I to determine the precise level of irony in someone who believes in transubstantiation seeing fit to query the eccentricities of someone else’s religious beliefs)…

As the self-styled heir to Blair, Cameron simply refuses to keep Ordinary People in the dark on these vital footballing matters, perhaps imagining that he is speaking to them in the only language the poor dolts understand…

On sporting matters that intersect more significantly with his day job, however, Mr Cameron is conspicuously silent. On the breaking of coalition promises not to continue the sell-off of playing fields, he declines to be drawn. Last year, he refused to comment on the Bahrain Grand Prix despite the backdrop of protests and allegations of human rights abuse, insisting that it was only “a matter for Formula One”.  read more

PHOTOGRAPH: Michiel Hendryckx