Tommy Martin: Fifa truly tireless in reminding you what a shower they are

Almost every waking minute has World Cup in it. You can be looking at a Saudi Arabia team sheet over your cornflakes and dozing off at night to Alan Shearer chuckling with Rio Ferdinand. 

The quotidian tasks of daily life are done to the background burble of Adrian Eames and Kenny Cunningham extolling the Tunisian press. This is football as ambient gas. It is as if FIFA aim to win over those refusing to watch by force, like a great aunt embracing a reluctant child into her ample bosom.

The sense of omnifootball is only exacerbated by the bloated injury time periods, which make the football matches feel like hostile military powers rolling their tanks into the peace-loving parts of your day reserved for other things. 

Families sit hungrily at the dinner table as the fourth official decrees ten more minutes of Senegal v Netherlands. Viewers catching England v Iran on their lunchbreak risk company disciplinary procedures when the Group B match rumbles past the 116-minute mark (Seriously, it felt like some sort of David Lean epic. Gareth of Arabia?).

The injury time thing is one of those typically pernickety bits of nonsense FIFA like to busy themselves with to pretend that their main line of business is not cosying up to brutal despots. And they are evidently using the same algorithm to calculate the match attendances. 

As I write, an attendance of nearly 60,000 has been announced for Morocco v Croatia when the actual crowd looks like it would fit into Tolka Park.

Such observations are merely from the bits of your day when you are following FIFA’s directive to “focus on the football”. 

The big hope of tournament organisers was that once the games started people would stop talking about migrant workers in body bags and gay people in jails. But that’s proving hard when FIFA and the Qataris keep distracting you by doing batshit crazy things that end up reminding you what a right shower they are.

So, as well as labouring through eight hours of football a day, you find yourself consuming surreal nonsense like the One Love armband controversy, when FIFA made an international incident out of a colouredy bit of cloth, presumably at the command of the big, spoiled baby in the Emir’s palace.

The governing body’s decision to clamp down on the vague, meek gesture of support for inclusion did at least show members of the LGBTQ community where they stand in relation to football. Which, to be exact, is on their own, watching a bunch of European football associations running away from them in terror at the prospect of a yellow card.

But the armband thing was only the half of it. There you are musing over the merits of USA’s high pressing system when you see the story about Qatari security confiscating Welsh bucket hats with rainbow colours on them. 

Then the American journalist Grant Wahl tweets that he’s been detained for wearing a t-shirt with a rainbow logo. Now the Belgians are being told they can’t wear their away jersey because it has the word ‘Love’ and, you guessed it, the rainbow colours embroidered on the collar.

Seriously, if the Qataris were as hard-working with a trowel and cement mixer as they are at hunting down any piece of clothing displaying rainbow colours then they wouldn’t have needed all those migrant workers in the first place. Not since ITV axed George, Zippy and Bungle has the rainbow caused such a controversy (Only cutting-edge references here kids!).

This sprawling, all-consuming sports-news fusion functions like an attention tennis match, with the football distracting you from the off-field stuff only as long as you avoid checking your phone to see the latest madcap story emerging from Qatar.

What’s that you’re watching, Mexico v Poland? Look over here! Local Qatari jobsworths ban Budweiser executives from drinking Budweiser in Budweiser hotel!

Taking in the Germany v Japan game? Not before you get a load of the German team posing with hands over mouths in protest against the armband business!

Frankly, this World Cup is the most exhausting thing you can do without getting off the couch. The person who most encapsulates the constant, wearying tonal dissonance is Gary Lineker, who must balance the BBC’s editorial independence with the professional requirement to banter with Micah Richards. It is in Gary’s handsome face where the entire moral ambiguity of the tournament must live.

Serious Face Gary welcomed viewers to coverage of the tournament’s opening match with frosty reservation. Happy Face Gary beamed in triumph after England’s performance against Iran. Happy Face Gary picked up after an entertaining first half in the France v Australia match, then, with one change of camera angle, threw over to Serious Face Gary to introduce a pre-recorded package about the climate consequences of the tournament.

In that report, one climate expert said that not only was FIFA’s claim that Qatar 2022 was entirely carbon neutral utter bollocks, but that this World Cup was the biggest carbon event ever to happen in human history OUTSIDE OF ACTUAL WARS! Truly, this is the tournament that keeps on giving. Back in studio Happy Face Gary was soon joshing with Micah again but you can see the toll all this is taking in the lines on that famously boyish visage.

By this stage the only thing for it is to turn in to the boycott of bed, there to dream of a happier, easier World Cup where it is all rainbows, and Kenny Cunningham worrying about Senegalese recovery runs is as tiring as it gets.