"I'm not some crackpot who just comes out with stupid remarks to cause controversy." The words are those of Glenn Hoddle, referring to the notorious twaddle about physical disability and reincarnation which brought such a storm down around his muddled head, and which have now cost him his job as England soccer manager. "You and I," he told a journalist from the London Times last weekend, "have been physically given two hands and two legs and half decent brains. Some people have not been born like that for a reason. The karma is working from another lifetime . . . What you sow, you have to reap . . . It comes around."
It may be said of course, that since Hoddle's job was to coach a football team and not to teach theology, it does not particularly matter that his religious beliefs are a baffling, self-made mishmash of Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, and whatever you're having yourself from the New Age stall. It may also be argued that the fate that has befallen him is an offence to the principle of free speech.
But nobody has denied Hoddle's right to hold peculiar views, or to voice them as a private citizen. What the Football Association - and significantly, its commercial sponsors - have found intolerable are Hoddle's churlishness and stupidity in publicly airing, as England's soccer manager, views that must offend disabled people throughout England and beyond, particularly disabled football supporters.
The job of England soccer manager had become a poisoned chalice long before Hoddle inherited it in 1996, because of the impossibly high expectations of the English public and media, and the fact that hounding the manager had become a blood sport for the tabloid papers. Then came Hoddle's autobiography - serialised profitably in Rupert Murdoch's Sun - in which he forfeited the trust of England players by making tawdry revelations, especially about the troubled Paul Gascoigne. There is a certain ironic justice in the fact that his nemesis has come via his own indiscretion in another Murdoch paper, the Times. Hoddle, like other England managers before him, became an embarrassment. And in his case the fault is largely his own.