Turn the Grinchometer Up to 11. I'm Pretty Glad Ivan Got the Beautiful Game.

I really am a kind of the Grinch of sport. I loathe it, I hate it, I want to kick it's athletic face in. I won't humour it, or lamely try (and fail) to get in the sporting spirit with stuff like the world cup. I want to pop all the footballs, burn the cricket bats, single handedly vomit the entire worlds supply of the sporty energy drinks into a big hole that leads directly to the very bowels of the Earth itself. Sport; and footy in particular is rubbish, and that's all there is too it! I am so averse to the cult of football, that I may actually end up living in a hermits cave on a hill, where those children who wear football kits at the beginning of matches will point and sing mocking songs about the miserable and weird creature who resides there every at every World Cup event with only his despair at the whole vacuous awfulness of footy mania as his only companion. So with that cheery assessment out of the way, it is not entirely unsurprising that I'm not beating my own bare back with a big heavy chain in some archaic grief ritual at the news of Russia winning the bid to host the 2018 World Cup.

Nothing hammered home to me the extent to which footymania had established it's iron foothold on the heart of the nation was when I took a walk around my neighbourhood on the day of the game that England were ejected from this years World Cup. I was quite literally the only person on the streets when that match was broadcast. This was a glorious summer Sunday afternoon, not a cloud in the sky and there was just me. It was then I realised just how much on the periphery of British society militant footy loathers like myself are during this event. Most non footy fans seem to make their deal with the soccer devil, or at least pay lip service to the event. I might like to think I was flouting convention by sticking to my anti soccer credentials, but trust me there was no-one paying any notice, the beautiful game takes custodian of most souls in the end. You are truly on your own during the World Cup. It was like being a survivor in 28 days later, but with less death and suburban zombies obviously.

This is just the kind of mania that grips the nation during a World Cup occurring overseas. Imagine one over here? There would literally be no escape. I would be a cornered lamb with a dodgy hind leg trying to evade a pack of growling wolves who hadn't had a square meal for a good while - totally screwed. I would have had to have entombed myself in a concrete bunker, cut off from all outside contact lest I go completely insane from overexposure. So as unpatriotic and mean spirited as it may sound, I am glad Russia is hosting it. They are welcome to have it as far as I am concerned. I know that there is going to be some major league corruption and backhanders going on behind the scenes whilst all this is going on. I also know that if the stadia aren't finished on time, the foreman won't just get a hostile Sun article as he may here, but will likely have a nuclear submarine sent round to his house as incentive to tighten the pace of construction a bit. But you know, there we are, it's a cruel world. That may sound like mean sentiment, but what would you expect from the Grinch?