Achtung!

The Germans are as oblivious to any "great footballing rivalry" with England as the Americans are to any "Special Relationship" with Britain. Playing England is to the Germans much as playing Scotland is to the English: a glorified, if glorified, friendly, and comparable to allowing a younger sibling to kick about with oneself and one's mates. Apart, that is, from the bit about letting him win.

This World Cup has not been as bad as the last one, during which a General Election would not have been reported and a war actually was not, the same war that we are still fighting. But I still cannot wait for it to be over from this country's point of view. A defeat in the final by either America or North Korea would have been ideal, but an earlier one by Germany would still be delicious. We really do need to learn that, if we must invent sports (and we are singularly ingenious at that one), then we should never, ever teach them to anyone else.

Football's working-class following, now a thing of the past since they could not possibly afford the tickets these days, was a product of the Church of England. It seems to have been quite by chance that public school curates, sent to rapidly expanding industrial areas in order to toughen them up, chose to teach the local youths soccer rather than rugger. But the rest is history.

However, it was the English seminaries in Spain and Portugal that introduced football to the Iberian world. So for Torres, for Ronaldo, and for Latin Americans too numerous to list, themselves now pivotal to the rise of the game in the United States, blame the Catholic Church. Or praise Her, as it suits you.