MORAL outrage, don't you just love it?

Well, this sceptered isle certainly does given the furore surrounding the FA - now possibly standing for fornicating antics rather than the Football Association of whom particular employees are now coming under increasing pressure.

Calls have gone out, secret whispers have been ushered in, campaigns are being frog-marched and shotgunned all about demanding the dismissal of the national football coach Sven-Goran Eriksson in the wake of his dalliance with an FA secretary Faria Alam.

The sweet FA, by the way, has also tangoed for two with esrtwhile FA Chief executive Mark Palios.

Claiming total innocence, Palios has since bitten the proverbial bullet and shot his bolt, quitting a tenure at Soho Square, the seemingly aptly-named address of football's governing body after 13 of some of the most turbulent months in the Association's history.

Now the inquests are being posted, the requiems being prepared, the interment almost upon us for Sven. Surely, many crow, he will have to follow Palios' sword-falling-upon example - at least, that is, the one of resigning not the one of reclining in a come hither pose.

Immense pressure is piling up on the Swede for his pay-masters to declare enough is enough as the FA seeks to somehow extricate itself from a drama that has been turned into a crisis and now into a farce. Where's Sir Brian Rix when you need him most to enter stage left-field and deliver an all-encompassing epilogue which explains the convoluted plot of all these trouser-descending shenanigans?

But even the inestimable thespian himself would be hard pushed to make himself heard above an eardrum-shattering din. There's the FA's collective screeching and yelling amid the caterwauling of authors of column inches and rent-a-gob commentators on the latest instalment of the Sven and Mark and Faria show.

The FA, the media, the nation - or so the pundits would have you believe - are ensnared in a proper tizzy of turmoil.

Frankly, my dears, I could not give a damn about what consenting adults get up to in their own private time.

None of the aforementioned trio were married at the time of their trysts, thereby they weren't exactly cheating on anyone. They were just having sex - and, thankfully, not all at the same time. Now that would be an action replay that would have to wait way beyond the witching hour, let alone any 9pm watershed.

Plainly and simply they were carrying on the sort of relationships, affairs, dalliances or flirtations that go on in every country, in every city, in every town, in every street, in every factory or business, including newspaper offices and television and radio stations, across the world.

Yet because it's the England coach we suddenly have a stampede of high horses snorting with indignation and bristling with disgust when it masks nothing less than hypocrisy. Why should anyone, Sven or Faria or Mark, or Tom, Dick or Harriet, have to resign simply for having a love life? Get real.

Now if anyone wants to sack Sven then why not look at his record as coach of the England team these past three years.

True, he has supervised a team that has got to the quarter-finals of the sport's two major competitions - the World Cup in 2002 and this summer's European championships in Portugal.

But on each occasion England should have advanced further and maybe would have progressed to the sharper end of business had Sven displayed the so-called motivational powers and tactical acumen that initially persuaded the FA to appoint him in the first place and earlier this year furnish him with an even more lucrative contract.

Despite having the raw talent which so annihilated Germany 5-1 in Munich in 2001, Eriksson has failed to maximise the potential of the players at his disposal. Never mind so-called sleaze let's question the ease with which the England team has slipped away from promise.

No, Sven has to be judged on results on the field alone. The axe will not fall now, but unless England improve and play with flair soon then it will be time for the FA as mistress to do the dumping.

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Updated: 11:15 Tuesday, August 03, 2004