An Irishman's Diary

NEWS THAT the French fast-food chain Quick has distanced itself from the national football team – or at any rate pulled its ads featuring Nicolas Anelka – illustrates just how far Raymond Domenech’s side has fallen.

In a more sensible world, it would be the other way around. The French football team would be distancing itself from the burger chain: perhaps by withdrawing Anelka from his sponsorship. Instead, and more in keeping with his role as an athlete, he would be encouraged to endorse other aspects of the famously healthy French diet. Fresh legumes, perhaps. Or portion control.

But the shambles into which France’s World Cup has sunk suggests that Nemesis, the goddess of divine retribution, is on the case: no doubt in response to the thousands of Irish fans who invoked her intercession.

As an admirer of most things French, I cannot quite share the rejoicing. Yes I was at the fateful game in Paris, and when I saw my first slow-motion replay of the Henry handball, two hours later in a bar, I nearly spewed my Kronenbourg 1664 with indignation. But I got over it quickly. Especially when, next day, I heard Bixente Lizerazu

– a member of the World Cup-winning French team – provoke Domenech into a radio studio walk-out with his assessment of the match.

“The Irish were superb and they were robbed,” he said. “Thierry’s handball was totally deliberate. There is no ambiguity. It was calculated, not very glorious, and I think he slept badly.” That was closure for me, right there. So now when I see Henry’s team falling apart in public and being urged by their shamed economy minister – poignantly, a former international synchronised swimmer – to pull themselves together, my feeling is less schadenfreude; more tristesse.

THE REAL BADDIEof that night in Paris, anyway, was Fifa. By luck or otherwise, football's world governing body got the result it wanted. Therefore, whatever about the French, it would be hard not to enjoy any humiliation the gods have planned for Sepp Blatter and his pals in South Africa.

In this respect, if no other, World Cup 2010 has been a triumph so far. The banishment of “le Sulk”, as Anelka is known, after the coach refused to pardon his French, is fully in keeping with what has been a rather ugly tournament. Maybe “ugly” is overstating it. But the beautiful game, so-called, has certainly been in short supply.

It starts with the music. There wasn’t much beautiful football 20 years ago in Italy, either – certainly not from us. But at least the keynote of that tournament was the Three Tenors, and Nessun Dorma, reverberating dramatically around the ancient ruins of Caracalla. By contrast, the current tournament’s keynote is also its only note, played incessantly by a tone-deaf trumpet.

Yes, there are opera snobs who thought that the fashion unleashed by Italia 90 – for multiple tenor combinations, microphoned up to blast out greatest-hit collections before stadium-sized crowds – was not so far removed from the vuvuzela (an instrument that, if it had a philosophy, would echo Pavarotti: “None Shall Sleep”). But I know which World Cup soundtrack I prefer.

As for the games themselves, these have been undermined by a problem involving the most simple piece of football equipment: the ball. You'd think this was something that, like a related invention – the wheel – not even Fifa could get wrong. Au contraire.

It has always been considered a good idea that a football “does things in the air”. The point, however, is that the person kicking it is supposed to control those things. Unfortunately, the Jabulani ball has all the subtlety of the vuvuzela, and none of its predictability. Its only virtue is that, like both Nicolas Anelka and the burgers he used to advertise, it’s quick.

No doubt Fifa’s thinking was that it would cause an avalanche of goals and thereby help sell soccer to America: where Nemesis, in a cruel joke, ensured that the 1994 World Cup final was a 120-minute long scoreless draw: the only one in tournament history. Portugal’s destruction of North Korea apart, however, the plan hasn’t worked.

Perhaps the only aspect of the current tournament in which players have excelled has been cheating. Some of the handballs have outdone even Henry’s. And the diving has been so good that the French economy minister probably recognises some of the moves from her synchronised swimming days.

I know nostalgia is a vice. But watching a Côte d’Ivoirean player go down clutching his face after a slight nudge in the chest from Brazil’s Kaká earlier this week, I couldn’t help recalling the last World Cup final and Zinedine Zidane’s magnificently Taurean head-butt to the chest of an Italian who insulted his sister. Amazing to think that was only four years ago. Yet already, for both France and for football, it seems like something from a more heroic age.