In episode 37 of the legendary, albeit wildly hit-and-miss, show Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Michael Palin plays the enthusiastic host of a quiz show called Prejudice. While it was undoubtedly satirical, some aspects of the show – Shoot The Poof, for example – have not aged particularly well. Times change, people evolve, mentally as well as physically, but one section of the show always makes me laugh, probably more than it should.
The host refers to last week’s competition in which viewers were asked to find a derogatory firm for Belgians. The runners-up are “the Sprouts”, “the Phlegms” but the winner was “Miserable Fat Belgian Bastards”. Perhaps you had to be there, but I found, and still do find, the punchline to be unexpectedly funny, crass though it is. No one is trying to come up with a derogatory term for Belgians this morning.
The naked corruption on display when Donald Trump behaved like the mob boss he is, calling on FIFA to suspend the one match ban on Folarin Balogun after his sending off against Bosnia, has soiled this World Cup and in the early hours of this morning it appeared, for one brief moment in time, that there might be a God after all. (Spoiler alert: there isn’t.)
From all accounts, Belgium absolutely battered the USA USA USA in their last 16 game and justice has been done. Balogun should never have been permitted to play but he did and it seems his presence helped fire up what was already a decent Belgian team and ensured that the rest of the world, or most of it, to get behind them, hoping in the true spirit of schadenfreude that the hosts would be humiliated. They duly were.
However, the stain on the World Cup remains, even though we view what happened more as a ‘what if the USA had beaten Belgium?’ situation. If the USA had won, we can only imagine the build up to the Quarter Final game. The pressure on them would have been incredible, worse even than it probably was last night when Mauricio Pochettino’s lost in what the BBC described as a “shambolic fashion”.
In the grand scheme of things, we take whatever small victories that we can. Trump’s grotesque presidency will stumble on for another couple of years, committing far worse atrocities than corruptly trying to influence football matches, but today we can celebrate, if that’s the right word, the elimination from the World Cup, of the main host nation who, thanks to him, almost no one wanted to succeed.
We were all Belgians last night, at least that’s how it seemed to me. Perhaps the surviving Pythons could perform a new Prejudice show asking viewers to come up with new words for the American president? I can think of a few, but for today the one that comes to mind is loser.
