It is a total irrelevance how the FA votes in Fifa's contest between Sepp Blatter and Mohamed bin Hammam
Have you been thrilled by the trailers for 2018: Revenge of the Fallen ? the big-budget saga of how the Football Association will handle the forthcoming Fifa presidential election? Wednesday, of course, is the big day, as the FA board decides how to vote in the contest between Sepp Blatter and Mohamed bin Hammam.
We can't be sure until the puff of hot air has emerged from the Wembley chimney, but the indications are they will elect to abstain ? a position of such monumental pluck and principle that it is difficult to put one's finger on the historical parallel. In recent times, you'd perhaps alight on the moment Nick Clegg ? newly installed as Lib Dem leader ? ordered his MPs to abstain from the EU treaty vote. Nick "sat on the fence as a point of principle", as his future cabinet colleague Theresa May neatly summarised, and in retrospect there was the vaguest of warning signs for the Cleggmaniacs, who were not even a glint in the electoral system's eye.
Either way, the 2018 debacle remains self-parodic to the end. Were a satirical playwright to tackle the fiasco, the only way they could up the ante would be to imagine a scenario in which England's ExCo vote for itself had been in doubt, and dependent upon bestowing bribes upon the various factions within the domestic game. In reality, of course, there is no suggestion that alleged vertebrate Geoff Thompson ever wavered in his support. Yet when Lord Triesman claims that the Premier League (whose chairman is Dave Richards) said it would only immediately back the 2018 bid (whose deputy chairman was Dave Richards) if Lord Triesman (whose FA colleague was Dave Richards) backed Game 39, the situation feels some way beyond satire.
All of which might make one question the point of the culture media and sport select committee calling Lord Triesman for an assault on Fifa last week, when its brief is to probe domestic football governance. At first glance, the headline-garnering decision looks the equivalent of a prime minister getting seduced by foreign policy. Bitter recent experience means we're all familiar with the type ? the sort that so enjoys swanking about on the world stage that he ignores the domestic sphere in favour of signing up to Mesopotamian adventures and the like.
But on further consideration, the committee's strategy seems clear: they are disporting themselves like those American Congressional committees which summon eye-catching witnesses, with genuine examples, including Kevin from the Backstreet Boys, being called to discuss mountain-top mining, and Elmo from Sesame Street ? a puppet ? being called to discuss funding of school music programmes. The practice underscores a committee's total impotence, but does get its members' faces on telly a lot.
And so with last week's diversion. The only thing more doomed than the MPs' assault on Zurich ? itself the equivalent of arguing against gravity ? will be their efforts to reform the FA. I suspect they have already divined this, and are gathering rosy headlines while they may.
Certainly, the FA is not a fit and proper organisation to run the game. Indeed, if you set out specifically to design a malfunctioning governing body you really couldn't do it better. The FA is already malfunction as art. Its only creative rival is a 1960 artwork by Jean Tinguely, leading light of the autodestructive movement. Entitled Homage to New York, this was a machine designed to batter itself to bits in the sculpture garden of the city's Museum of Modern Art ? though ultimately it stalled, and required finishing off with an axe. The FA, in contrast, never fails to accomplish self-defeat, be it the 2018 bid, the QPR cock-up, or its institutionalised inability to stand up to the Premier League.
It is the governing body equivalent of a black hole, ineluctably sucking good men and bad into its complete and utter darkness. What happens on the pitch is well within its event horizon, with the FA's energy-consuming properties presumably the reason England can't win against opposition like Algeria. Indeed, perhaps instead of hiring endless lawyers in its search for enlightenment, the FA should enlist some quantum physicists to explain its inescapable uselessness. No doubt events of one sort or another will soon open up a vacancy at its head yet again. In anticipation of that inevitability, may I nominate Stephen Hawking as the only appropriate next chairman. I don't think the Professor would have to deploy many of his brain cells to demonstrate that how the FA votes is a total irrelevance ? and will be for light years.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2011/may/19/fa-fifa-sepp-blatter-mohamed-bin-hammam
