Cod Almighty | Diary

Counting down to when it all begins again

11 June 2018

Open Diary writes: So here we are in the period of countdowns. Three days to go before the World Cup starts and ten days to go before the fourth division fixture lists are released. There are also incidentals like the unveiling of the new home shirt in five days, although you may not be holding your breath for that. Then we can look to the pre-season matches and the kick-off at the start of August.

So far, we've had a couple of new signings to contemplate and, perhaps not surprisingly, no news of the prospects of those released. It will say a lot about the various signings from the last two years if they end up playing below the Football League next season, which is what many expect.

But first we can look forward to the World Cup in Russia. This was the tournament that the FA was keen to host, of course, but in the event nobody who mattered was inclined to consider England. There are some positives for any England fans – for a start there's no World Cup song to cringe about, and the England side travels with nobody expecting any degree of success. It's a bit like Italia '90 really and look what happened there. There's also a good combination of young talent with something to prove, so who knows how they will do? The Belgium match will be very telling because on paper you'd think England would be lucky to get any sort of result.

Friday's diary suggested that the World Cup is all about greed but in reality it's more about globalisation. That might be the equivalent of greed to some people but it's more about opening up new parts of the world to major football tournaments.

During the bidding process in 2010 Andrey Arshavin held up a map of Europe with a line down the middle, showing which countries in Europe have previously hosted a World Cup. The line went down from Sweden through Germany and Austria and out through Italy. On the left were all the western European countries who had held a World Cup. On the right, to the east, there were none. I remember thinking that Beckham, Cameron and Wills might see sense and come home now. But of course they didn't get it and crashed and burned in the first round of voting.

That's the point of holding it in Russia – it's taking the World Cup to a massive area which has never held a World Cup before. And the Russians made all sorts of promises about freedom of movement and welcoming foreign supporters. Again, the point being that Russia isn't used to hordes of foreigners travelling around the country in an unsupervised way. It will change the place in a way that the 1980 Olympics (which the west boycotted) and the Winter Olympics in Sochi never could do. We are brought up with dire stories of Russian hooligans looking for trouble, but on those occasions I've been to Russia (for work) it is pretty obvious that the average Russian outside of a big city hasn't had much contact with foreigners.

And why Qatar in 2022? Well, it's to open up football in the Arab world. In countries like Iran, for example, women are not allowed to go to a football stadium to watch a match. And remember that the football stadia aren't being built by the Qataris: that's being done by various international building businesses, some of which are British.

But I guess we'll all cluster around a telly somewhere to watch the matches and hope that we can at least get to win a match in the knockout stage.

Then it's the fixture lists, where we exchange Accrington, Luton, Wycombe, Coventry, Barnet and Chesterfield for Oldham, Northampton, someone else, Bury, Macclesfield and Tranmere. Surely, we can put together a side that can at least challenge for the play-offs? Who is there to fear? It's not like there's an obvious 'big side' like Portsmouth, Plymouth or Coventry.

Let’s hope that Michael Jolley can persuade those who are thinking about their options to sign up for another year, and then sign up some more promising new faces over the next few weeks.