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FA may stand for any number of things, apart from the Football Association, few of them printable, However in the light of recent events it seems they will stand for almost anything. Appointing 66-year-old Lord Triesman as an independent chairman has proved a ghastly mistake for he has underlined the adage that there is no fool like an old fool.
There is another adage too. As Shakespeare wrote, “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.” If indeed Melissa Jacobs, who ensnared him in her honey trap has been scorned - no doubt we shall find out in the Mail on Sunday’s next instalment this weekend.
Welcome to the House of Fun that is the FA’s HQ at Wembley. What has been happening there is reminiscent of those wonderful Whitehall Theatre bedroom farces where Brian Rix’s trousers were up and down like a yo-yo.
The volcanic ash hovering over Triesmangate leaves a nasty taste in the mouth, a massive dent in England’s 2018 World Cup ambitions and yet another sit vac notice pinned on the FA’s notice board.
Even worse, it has encouraged Alan Sugar to throw his Amstrad computer into the ring for the FA chairmanship. Someone should tell him now “You’re fired!” before he is hired because with Lord Sugar in charge it would be a decidedly unsweet FA. He doesn’t do humility. Can you imagine him schmoozing with the likes of Blatter and that perpetual Anglophobe irritant Jack Walker? Sugar would get up more noses than a stash of the white stuff at an Amy Winehouse housewarming.
So who should run English football? You could thumb through a whole catalogue of potential candidates to be the next to sip at the poisoned chalice but to my mind there is only really one name which stands out - Sir Trevor Brooking, for six years the FA’s director or football development. Here is someone who has respect coursing through his veins. He was not only one of the brainiest and most elegant footballers the nation has ever produced but he has proved he knows how to steady a ship and steer it on a good course as he demonstrated when he was a first class chairman of Sport England.
The former West Ham and England stylist always had intelligence and sophistication as a player, and there is no-one outside of Fabio Capello among the vast number of FA hirelings who knows more about the game from top to bottom.
Triesman was the first independent FA chairman, appointed because of Government pressure following the Burns Report, and clearly the experiment of bringing in someone from politics has not worked. Football needs the right sort of football man to run the game and in 61-year-old Brooking (pictured) the FA board have exactly that person under their noses.Who better than the thinking fan’s pro to bridge the damaging gap between the FA and the Premier League?
I am not suggesting Brooking should also lead the World Cup bid, which needs someone not only with impressive clout but bundles of charisma. Sir Trev may not quite have the pizzazz for that but he certainly has far more than the new incumbent Sir Geoff Thompson, an erstwhile FA chairman who is known as the Invisible Man during his term of office.
My hunch is that we will see Seb Coe play a bigger role in the 2018 bid - at least doing as much as he can with his current demanding commitment running the 2012 Olympics. But his advice and that of his bid side-kick, Sir Keith Mills will be invaluable. I would not be surprised if it is Seb makes the platform speech in December, with the two Daves - Beckham and Cameron - alongside him as he tries to win over FIFA with the same passionate oratory that swayed the IOC delegates in Singapore five years ago.
As someone who has always thought from the kick-off in the bidding game that Russia would get the 2018 World Cup because it suits FIFA and Sepp Blatter to go into previously unchartered World Cup territory - it would be the first final to be held in Eastern Europe - I would not quite say in the words of Muhammad Ali that England’s chances have gone from slim to none. There is still hope – but alas, not much. There are still some good pros on the England team like Coe, Mills, David Dein and the first rate CEO Andy Anson who are smooth operators.
But Blatter, no doubt influenced by the political pull of Russian Premier Vladimir Putin and the financial muscle of oligarchs Roman Abramovich and Alisha Usmanov (ironically both fiscal powerhouses behind English clubs Chelsea and Arsenal respectively), already appears to be hinting that England’s better bet would be to go for the 2022 tournament.
The question is whether England have now made one too many gaffes to climb back on the bidding bandwagon, and whether here are yet more skeletons lurking in those cupboard’s lining the FA’s corridors of power.
Happily there appear to be none in Sir Trevor Brooking’s. He has led an exemplary life on and off the field and he is surely the man to lead English football out of its administrative mess.
Alan Hubbard is an award-winning sports columnist for The Independent on Sunday, and a former sports editor of The Observer. He has covered 11 summer Olympics and numerous World Cup finals.