EVEN those of us who don’t watch much football cannot fail to have noticed that England flopped out of the World Cup. All the hype and hope came to nought.

You would have to ask someone who knows more than this columnist for an explanation, whether it was down to the manager, Roy Hodgson (who has in general escaped the usual monstering from the media), the players or possibly the wind direction on the day.

I have my own theory, which is that the media mogul Rupert Murdoch is to blame.

Well, I generally find that blaming Rupert is a good idea.

Murdoch jumped in with the highest bid when the Premier League was first floated as an idea in 1990, and ever since then, money has talked at the top end of English football.

This has led to what some call the Premier League paradox: as the league becomes more and more successful as an arm of sporting global showbusiness, the national team seems to have diminished.

So isn’t this a perfect example of what happens when money speaks louder than anything else? The Premier League expands endlessly, yet this has the unintended consequence of leaving a weakened England side with too few good home-grown players to pick from.

It seems only the other day that a promotional World Cup copy of The Sun dropped through all our letter boxes, stuffed full of empty patriotism and stale hymns to what it means to be English. Well, that was worth all the effort that went into it, wasn’t it?

There has been much talk of British values lately, not least because of efforts by Education Secretary Michael Gove to insist that our schools teach these values.

It can be hard to pin these matters down.So it is useful that Mr Gove’s department provides a definition of “democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs”.

That’s fine, if rather sweeping. Surely those are basic human values, rather than rules to what it means to be English. And Mr Gove quite forgot to include that important national characteristic: getting used to England losing at football again.

Incidentally, I am old enough to remember 1966. We were on a family holiday in France. Our French hosts took us on a motoring trek up into the foothills of the Pyrenees. There was a meal involved and a television to watch the game.

If it takes as long for England to win again, I won’t be around to record my feelings.

 

• SITTING down is the new smoking, warned an email which dropped into my in-box the other day. Too much effortless contact of bottom to chair could give you cancer according to this theory, as also reported by the Daily Mail.

Everything gives you cancer if you believe that newspaper, down to and including reading the Mail itself, it wouldn’t be at all surprising to discover. Well, it gives me a headache sometimes.

As a rule it is best not to read health-scare stories in the Mail in order to avoid discovering new and dreadful ways in which to die.

The latest example was based on a report from a German university. This found that sitting down increased the chance of cancer of the bowel, womb and lung.

Well, I’m certainly safe from one of those, but still this is worrying news for those of us who sit down at work.

One answer is said to be the standing-up desk, some of which have a treadmill fitted so that the upright worker can get some exercise while they are at whatever task detains them during office hours.

As many people sit down for a living, this seems like a perfect scare story, as hardly anyone will be safe. There are probably books being written already about how we should stand up at all times.

Soon enough chairs will come with government health warnings. But that’s all right because if you sit down you won’t be able to see them.

All this was so worrying that I stood up and went for a walk round the block.

Then I had to sit down again to write this column.

Some people just don’t realise the dangers that columnists expose themselves to while bravely sitting on their bums all day and pontificating.