Call me naive. Call me unwordly, unstreetwise, unrealistic. Call me Rhoda for all I care. But I was actually shocked on Friday morning when my butcher, a good honest Spurs fan, told me of England’s error as he perceived it. ‘Should’a stuck one on Suarez’s injured leg in the first 10 minutes, got him off the pitch’. I thought he was joking. But no. He wasn’t, he was totally serious.

I ran this awful suggestion, which was still shocking me, past my mate Vaughan the sandwichmaker and not so honest Stoke fan (none of them are) who agreed wholeheartedly with this suggestion, this failure to cause injury was the undoubted cause of England’s downfall. But he’s a Stoke fan. His team ‘do what is necessary’, they ‘let you know they’re there’, they break fucking legs if that’s what it takes.

I later learned that on TalkSport radio Friday morning in the inevitable post-mortem debate, there was much talk of not ‘making Suarez aware of his injury’, as they apparently should have done.

Then I read that Daniel Sturridge ‘should have made more’ of the elbow he received in his face. Meaning he should have hit the ground as if he’d been shot and writhed around in apparent agony until the referee either awarded him a penalty or an Oscar. Or sent him off for ‘simulation’.

So now it comes down to the coach. For being ‘naive’, like me, and not showing his players how to act injured, how to look for any outstretched defender’s leg to hurl themselves over, how to apply suitable orthopaedic stress onto injured body parts (like we do in tai chi), for not studying x-rays of the opposing teams before matches to know which parts to target.

I’m not suggesting we wrap players up in cotton wool. Only Wayne Rooney before we send him home early so he doesn’t get damaged in the crate. But there is a line between the ‘physical side to the game’ and intentional wounding, or ‘grievous bodily harm’ as its called in court. The other side of that line, though equally blurred, is reacting to that physicality. If it hurts like a sonofabitch, you’re allowed to fall down and clutch it. But if you suffer a minor knock to the shoulder, falling down and clutching your face (Rivaldo) is simply unacceptable.

Our game (yes, its still ‘our’ game even though we’re coming home, because we invented it and England is still the home of football even though we’re shit) is being corrupted by cheating.

Though yesterday afternoon I had a unique experience. I found myself rooting for Iran. Against Argentina. The Argies were shit and boring and Iran, in the second half, realised that their South American foes were not in fact gods but just mere mortals who weren’t particularly that good. So they started to play the game properly instead of anticipating the armageddon that never arrived, and they were great. Iran. Who’d’a thought? Obviously not Leo Messi who put paid to the Ayatollah’s finest, eventually, but they did themselves proud. And with not a nuclear weapon in sight.

Happy, non-violent, unsimulated Sunday

A xxxx