IN the week when the BBC announced the return of iconic children’s programme the Clangers, the clangour of England’s advance to next summer’s World Cup finals in Brazil grew louder than the soup dragon using a megaphone pumped through speakers racked up to number 11.

Has there ever been such a commotion, such a racket, such a fever?

In the wake of England beating Poland with a mixed bag of a performance to top their qualifying group and book the trip to Rio, it was like Pandora’s Box had been jemmied open and typhoons of over-heated hype allowed to befoul the air.

Holiday company phone lines were jammed, 20 things you did, and did not, want to know about Brazil were unleashed, odds on who would be the first to score/roar/snore/ deplore, or plain old bore were compiled.

There were even considered – now there’s a laugh – articles in newspapers and broadcasts on television on who the very likely lads would be in the 23 party uncle Roy Hodgson would pick for the expedition to the land of the Sugar Loaf Mountain.

Such speculation was the daftest in all the World Cup lava that flared within hours of goals by Wayne Rooney and Steven Gerrard started England’s folly-footed dreaming.

I mean, there’s more than seven months to complete in the current domestic season. Seven and a bit long months during which any number of Rio-hoping candidates could suffer loss of form, loss of fitness – maybe even loss of liberty given some of the high-jinks and banter-fuelled excesses among the ranks of multi-coloured boot wearers.

Sensible and stoic calls for realism by national coach Hodgson and some of his more seasoned performers were drowned out by the Copacabana cacophony – and there’s still 270-plus days to go to the World Cup kick off.

There wasn’t even time for the hoots, howls and hollers to momentarily subside before the public were delivered their first “so-called” World Cup scandal – Hodgson’s half-time homily of simians lost in space.

Never mind that when talking of an astronaut and an ape Hodgson used the word “monkey”, the more pressing point, as succinctly made by a sports-desk colleague here at Walmgate Towers, was what the blazes was Hodgson on about anyway? What kind of inspirational half-time team talk was that? It’s hardly Churchillian is it?

Maybe uncle Roy should have rabbitted on about serpents, then it could at least have been called reptilian.

But even more pertinent is that rather than the FA having to issue a defensive statement about the integrity of their coach, who could only be accused of evoking a lame joke, they might be better employed finding the actual snake in the grass who leaked the half-baked Hodgson humour to that organ of moral rectitude and righteousness, The Sun.

The revelation of the joke, as it was, was perniciously sneaked, an action no doubt enveloped in toxic intent, out of the dressing-room into the public domain so stoutly defended by the most derisory red top. So much for a united party on a night when the whole of the England squad should have been celebrating the achievement of squeaking out of a modest group to embark on the road to Rio.

It certainly must rile Hodgson and his backroom staff, as well as the majority of his squad, if one of their number has run to The Sun.

And if that’s how that damnable, despicable, downright disgraceful rag is going to behave amid celebrations of actually making it to Rio, then the next seven months-plus will be enough to examine the patience of Jesus Christ, whose Chris the Redeemer statue stands atop the Corcovado peak, which also towers above Rio.

Rather than the road to the Brazilian hot-spot it’s going to be the road to purgatory if the antics of aforementioned scandal-sheet is anything to go by.

Between now and the June 6 kick-off to the big event in a nation that is entitled to be called the spiritual home of the World Cup, there’s going to be scandal upon scandal.

If some of our footballers believe they live in a fishbowl now, then the glass wall will be closing in even further.

 

WHAT a contrast to the capture of a place in football’s World Cup finals to the rugby league World Cup which starts on these very shores – Great Britain – in just over a week from now.

When I pored through the sports section of my Sunday newspaper, almost the full first four pages featured the latest rugby union matches. Of the impending rugby league World Cup there was not a single sentence.

Now that is a national disgrace.