Mick Hartley

No surprise here: Hitchens doesn't like sport.

And now for a sports roundup: in Angola in early January a gang of shooters sprays the bus carrying the national soccer team of Togo, killing three people in the process, and a local terrorist group announces that as long as the Africa Cup of Nations tournament is played on Angolan soil, fresh homicides will be committed. The member states of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) that have the task of hosting both the Cup of Nations and the soccer World Cup in Cape Town this summer are in disarray as a consequence of the dispute between Angola and Congo over the "security" aspects of these allegedly prestigious sporting events.

On my desk lies an essay by the brilliant South African academic R. W. Johnson [probably this one – MH], describing the waves of resentment and disruption that are sweeping through the lovely city of Cape Town as the start of the World Cup draws near. Cost overruns and corruption, the closing of schools to make room for a hastily constructed new stadium, violent animosity between taxi drivers and mass-transit workers, constant disputes over the rigging of "draws" for the playoffs, allegations of bribery of referees … Nothing is spared.

He goes on, perhaps inevitably, to quote Orwell: "sport is an unfailing cause of ill-will".

What can you say? If you don't like sport, you don't like sport. It's like a deaf person bemoaning the idiocy of opera – the expense! the fat ladies! They may well have some good arguments, but if they can't hear the beauty then somehow they're missing the point. At least he's not reduced to the "grown men chasing a piece of leather round a muddy field" school of sport criticism.

This is an odd aside though:

Incidentally, isn't there something simultaneously grandiose and pathetic about the words "World Cup"? Not unlike the micro-megalomaniac expression "World Series" for a game that only a handful of countries bother to play.

No, there's nothing odd about it at all. Football – soccer – is the one sport that can legitimately claim the title of World Cup for its major tournament.

Perhap Hitchens has lived in the US for too long.