British football commentators (and Marcel Desailly) are lamenting the elimination of Ghana at the quarter-final stage of the World Cup, beating up on the Uruguayans when the game was there for the Ghanaians to seize (if a penalty kick in your favour is the last kick of the game and you're a bundle of nerves, give it to someone with a cooler head instead of trying to take the glory yourself). But if England had topped their group and faced The Black Stars in the Last-16 of the tournament, Ghana would have been viewed as fodder for The Three Lions, despite being Africa's last team standing, indeed 'representing' the whole of its continent no less. It would have been "yeah, it's sad, but England come first." It's almost exactly the same position when England, Germany and South Africa were bidding for the 2006 World Cup a decade ago. England were eliminated and it went down to a head-to-head between the Teutons and the Rainbow Nation. The New Zealand member of the FIFA decision panel abstained, effectively handing the prize of being World Cup hosts to Germany. The English were very bitter about this, saying how unjust it was that the tournament had been snatched away from South Africa. But what if England had won the rights, after all? The prevailing feeling would have commiserated "well, South Africa can have a shot at the next one." Hypocrisy is unbound on this island and one can well understand why England and its football corps are viewed as arrogant by the rest of the world. The thinking of those interested with English football can be as numbskulled as the way the England team has played in South Africa.