FIFA World Cup: Qatar boycotts valid but difficult for soccer lovers

The globally enormous tournament starts tomorrow morning (AEDT). If you're not going to boycott it, why aren't you?

Shouldn't one be ashamed of endorsing, by watching Qatar's World Cup, a World Cup so very perniciously different from previous extravaganzas of the beautiful game?

Yes the World Cup is usually a matter of wonder, Jonathan Wilson writes for UnHerd, "and yet, it's impossible not to approach Qatar with a sense of unease".

His piece captures and covers all of the things that should be making all thinking, conscience-equipped souls uneasy about this World Cup.

There is the catalogue of Qatar's abuses of human rights, its persecutions of homosexuals and its readiness to spend an estimated $220 billion on staging the event as, it is accused, an exercise of "sportswashing" itself, Qatar, clean of all its sins against those it persecutes. Those persecuted include the slaves worked to death to build Qatar's World Cup stadiums.

Then as well there is the corruption surrounding the awarding of the hosting rights to so improbable a nation (this is the first World Cup since 1934 to be hosted by a nation that has not previously played in it).

Sixteen of the 22 delegates who chose suspiciously undeserving Qatar as the 2022 host (in the process snubbing the applications of deserving Australia, Japan, South Korea, and the USA) have since been either convicted or credibly accused of Qatar-favouring skulduggery.

If one is ever on the grounds of decency going to boycott a televised event then surely this World Cup has to be it. It will not surprise if one's very TV set itself, too conscience-stricken and principled to beam the event, vile Qatar's shameful $220 billion advertisement for its sportswashed self, declines to allow the malignant jamboree into one's home.

But lots of us, unless our TVs make this ethical intervention for us, will struggle to deny ourselves this World Cup.

I have loved, played, watched (including on the very first black and white TV sets with screens the size of a chocolate box lids) and worshipped soccer ever since as an urchin-infant of the 1950s I laced up my first pair of soccer boots. (And how heavy, leathery and clunky and orthopaedic-looking football footwear was in those olden, golden but leathery and clunky days!)

Oscar Wilde's amoral character owns up he can "resist everything except temptation" and, without my TVs or God's intervention I do expect to watch the World Cup albeit with 49 per cent of my soul shrivelled up with shame.

Meanwhile, Wilson imagines UK audiences for the World Cup may be shrivelled up with cold.

"For [UK World Cup football fans] there is a prospect of a winter sitting huddled under blankets, struggling to afford rising energy prices (caused by a war started by the last World Cup hosts), hoping the power cut is over in time to watch the next game, beamed live from a country that is only staging the tournament because of the profits it has made from selling gas. Geopolitics has a sudden immediacy," he writes.

Meanwhile, one felt hardly any need to even try to resist the temptation to watch on TV the just-completed 2022 ICC Men's T20 Cricket World Cup. Yes, T20 is a frivolous, instant-gratification, big-bashing, balderdashing form of the great game, but then we all need a little balderdash in our otherwise dour lives.

And to watch the T20 Cricket World Cup on TV was also, because its coverage was exclusive to commercial television, to expose oneself to the exotic world of the TV advertising juxtaposed with the enthralling cricket.

The advertising was enthralling, too, in its way.

One particularly enjoyed, as entertainments, those ads that claim magical powers for their services and products. We all need more magic in our lives, and ads for treatments/spells that, with the aplomb of Penn and Teller, grow hair on hitherto bald male skulls and that turn hitherto old and limping dogs into creatures that can sprint and leap like young, barking gazelles do cheer us all up in the way the happiest fairytales always do.

And, whether or not anything known to man can influence a man's (notoriously self-willed) bladder the amusing TV ads for Pee-Less tablets (their actual name!) claiming to achieve for men what the product's name boasts, did one's heart a power of good.

But some TV advertising perplexes.

During the cricket my intellectual's brow was furrowed by those advertisements for motor cars that for at least three different models show them pitted against and triumphing over wild, craggy, uninhabitable mountain and wilderness places (usually festooned with active volcanos spitting fire and lava and criss-crossed with angry, torrential rivers) where only eagles dare and where no timid family saloon and its timid driver would dare to go.

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Quite apart from the depicted cars shewn rampaging through and ruining pristine wild places and fragile habitats one wonders how these ads say anything beguiling to those of us who will only ever want to drive on mere roads, taking our kids to school, our mums to their geriatricians.

As I write ACT motorists (those snowflakes of the road!) are presently aghast at even having to drive where there are unusual little dents in roads.

Alarmist motorists imagine these imperfections are chasms and call them "potholes" and threaten to bring down governments because of them. They, these snowflakes, are the last to ever dream of taking motoring adventures among crags, torrents and volcanoes.