The Boys from Brazil

There’s a sporting event coming up soon called the World Cup. Something to do with football, I believe. It doesn’t happen very often, so you might not be aware of it, but I wanted to talk about a World Cup tradition that has evolved recently. This is the tradition in which the England team gets knocked out of the tournament in a penalty shoot-out with a much more competent, confident bunch of players like those found in Germany or Brazil.

This year, however, when England meets Brazil in the semi-finals, the legions of English plumbers and brickies desperate to support their team by gathering in pubs 6,000 miles away from where the players could actually hear them will have the advantage of a secret weapon. The book and film The Boys from Brazil described the attempt to clone Adolf Hitler. As far as I can tell, the cloning operation in Brazil has taken place, but it wasn’t multiple Hitlers they produced: it was a legion of Gareth Southgates.

And how do I know about this heinous and dastardly cloning project? I arrived in Brazil yesterday and went to a bar. In this bar was a projector showing a futebol match between the two biggest teams in Brazil. Many of the players in this match will also represent their country in South Africa. The game turned out to be a draw, and a penalty shoot-out followed. A Brazilian player went up to take the first penalty. A Brazilian player, remember. From the country that invented Pelé. These guys start kicking balls while they’re still in the womb. Taking a penalty is no bigger deal for these players than taking a shower.

So this player kicked the ball. It moved slowly and pathetically towards the arms of the goalkeeper. Actually the goalie had time to read a book (not that he resembled the reading type) before needing to block the ball’s passage. It was like watching Gareth Southgate in 1996 all over again. Then the other team had a go, and this next player gave an equally crap kick that again resulted in a save. This went on… and on… and on. Four penalties were missed by each team before one of the teams eventually had the brilliant idea of not using one of their Gareth Southgate clones, and instead used someone who could kick with confidence.

If Brazil fields their clone army this summer then England might finally be in with a chance of making it to the final.

In other news today, there was a plane crash involving a parliamentary candidate. They think the banner his plane was towing got caught around the tail. Ouch. As I was digesting this news on my laptop (or, bizarrely, laptop in Portuguese) in the shade of a Brazilian palm tree that sheltered me from the scorchio thirty degree afternoon, a Sky News video clip about the crash suddenly showed an old friend and radio presenter Duncan Barkes. I’ve known him for ten years and have had the pleasure of being interviewed on his radio shows several times. He is now the spokesman for the political party of the hospitalised politician who was rescued from the plane wreckage as well as being a great broadcaster with his own Facebook fanclub. If Brazil decided to clone Duncan Barkes instead of Gareth Southgate they would still be useless at penalty shoot-outs, but at least they’d get coherent and intelligent post-match interviews for a change.