National Anthems No Bad Thing

Normally when the Fifa president treats us to his innermost thoughts, as he does from time to time on subjects as varied as Premiership wages and women's football shorts, critics are queuing up to rubbish him. Last week, however, when he tentatively suggested the singing of national anthems before international games might be scrapped, the overwhelming chorus was one of approval.

Call me old-fashioned, but I preferred the traditional arrangement, with Sepp Blatter as pantomime villain and the rest of us a pantomime audience, only too happy to greet every pronouncement with hisses and catcalls. It just seems natural to want to disagree with Blatter on any given subject, and while I am no great fan of national anthems - especially England's - I can easily think of several reasons why abolishing them at football matches might not be such a good idea.

1) Other 'more civilised' sports such as rugby would continue to sing them, mostly without any jeers or boos. Were football to unilaterally stigmatise its own followers as too badly behaved to be trusted with national anthems, other codes would make it a point of principle to sing them to Eisteddfod standard. This will inevitably attract comment in the snooty papers.

2) No national anthem ever disappeared through being banned. Just because the marching band no longer struck up before kick-off would not mean an end to 'God Save The Queen' or 'Deutschland Uber Alles'. Anyone with an inkling of history knows what happens when popular anthems are driven underground. And even 'God Save The Queen' is popular. Commentators may have been too busy being scandalised about their whistling over opponents' anthems to notice, but England fans sing their own tune with gusto. Why the 'No Surrender/10 German Bombers' fraternity are so fond of an undistinguished dirge of subservience to a hired bunch of German aristos has always been a mystery to me, but fond they unquestionably are. As it stands, you hear GSTQ once per England game, maybe twice if England are winning, and that is plenty. Ban it and you give it the status of a rebel song, an instant cultural identifier like 'We Shall Overcome' or 'Flower of Scotland'. People absolutely love singing forbidden songs in defiance of authority, and football fans, already something of an oppressed minority, are no different. If you want to hear God Save The Queen bellowed five times an hour from every bar in the vicinity of the stadium, and then five times each half once the game kicks off, forbidding fans to sing it is definitely the best way.

3) Not all anthems are booed anyway. Most of the trouble occurs between nations with a history of conflict, or nations who happen to be playing Turkey. The anthems do not cause the ill-feeling, they just provide a vehicle for its expression. Fair enough, you might say, take away that temptation. But Scots will still hate English, Germans and Turks will not be best of friends, so what then? Will Fifa's next move be to clamp down on those inflammatory national strips, with their flag-derived colours and provocative crests just asking to be kissed or saluted? Are they going to stop all terrace chanting, just in case national stereotypes get a mention? You can see where this argument is going, can't you?

4) Might it not be easier just to stop playing international football? The problems Blatter identified in the wake of the trouble between Turkey and Switzerland - fancy Blatter taking an interest when Switzerland were playing - were because two nations were competing for a single qualifying place, not because they were singing at each other. If you organise tournaments on a national basis you are pretty much asking for patriot games. National anthems, flags and crests are part of the package. If you are happy with Turkey playing Switzerland, in other words, it seems perverse to carp at the airing of national anthems, however unenthusiastically they are received. On the other hand, if you really dislike the nationalistic aspect of football - and it is always football; no other game pits so many enemies against each other - the alternative is perfectly straightforward. Just abolish the World Cup and the continental championships. All the best players in the world appear in the Champions League anyway, and it would probably be a popular move to expand that into a summer tournament and stage it each year in some sun-kissed part of the globe.

The President of Fifa is unlikely to favour solving the club-v-country dispute in such a drastic way, so he should think carefully about what it is that makes international football so popular. Narrow patriotism, that's what it is. In this country at least, for every progressive who loves to see football as a universal language, there are 10 Little Englanders who just want to beat Johnny Foreigner.

Crowds can be split by similar proportions into those who are offended by insults and abuse aimed at opponents' national anthems, and those who think it is practically a patriotic duty to join in. It's not pretty, in fact it can be downright ugly, but it's football. At least you know you're not at Twickenham.

Say goodbye to all our yesterdays

Some commentators have pointed out that the glowing tributes to the fairly obviously flawed life and career of George Best were not wholly motivated by unreserved admiration for the player himself, but had more to do with middleaged critics mourning the loss of their own youth.

You don't say.

Sport as a metaphor for the transience of physical perfection and the relentless passage of time, eh. Whatever will they come up with next?

Sport has always performed that function, and the only other sphere that comes anywhere close is popular music, which is why the two are often linked. As in Best being dubbed the Fifth Beatle, for instance, or David Beckham's pal Robbie Williams making an album called Sing When You're Winning. Nothing can transport you back to your formative years as quickly as an old record or an old footballer.

What strikes some as a disproportionate outpouring of grief over Best is not a continuation of a trend established by the public blubfests surrounding the deaths of Princess Diana, the Queen Mother or Pope John Paul II, but a perfectly natural, explainable phenomenon. If sport is both a celebration of life and a tacit acknowledgement of death, then the George Best story is surely its most poignant parable. Nostalgia is permissible. This stuff is within you and without you, as George Harrison might have put it.

What are middle-aged critics supposed to do when their sublimated youth dies of chronic alcoholism? Console themselves that footballers are better looked-after these days? That's like shrugging and pretending not to notice when the next Beatle dies, on the grounds that we've still got Oasis. Somehow I don't think so, even though Noel Gallagher's comments on the possibility of investing in Manchester City have just offered a wonderful insight into the relationship between football and music. 'I'm not going to give my money to a load of 25-year-old brats who'll ask me for £35,000 a week,' Gallagher said. 'I've never been friends with a footballer. The vast majority of them are complete idiots.'

Don't suppose there's any chance of Icon, the new magazine by footballers for footballers, fixing up an interview?

No beating the sound of silence

As some of the tributes to George Best showed, a minute of applause can be just as moving as a minute of silence to mark a loss, and in some cases might be more appropriate. It would be a shame, however, were clapping to be ushered in simply because football crowds have lost the ability to maintain a respectful hush for 60 seconds. There's no disguising the fact that complete silence will always be the most remarkable sound a gathering of 40,000 or 50,000 can make.