Last  week, England’s football manager, Roy Hodgson, did extremely well in ensuring that a slightly above average football team booked a place at next year’s  World Cup Finals. Unfortunately, the celebrations were tarnished because one of the players  leaked details of the manager’s half time team talk to the national press. Evidently, the talk (a private affair obviously meant only for the players present) featured a joke involving two astronauts and a monkey and the player took offence at what he perceived was a racist joke.

I am familiar with the joke, having first heard it about 20 years ago. It’s reasonably funny and the joke is not at the expense of the monkey but at the two astronauts whose only job is to feed the monkey, thus inferring that the monkey is more intelligent than they are. The astronauts, for the purposes of the joke, could be any nationality you wanted, whether English, Scots, Irish, French, American or whatever. It was just a playful laugh at the nation of your choice and, as I said, compliments the monkey at the expense of the chosen nation.

Clearly, the footballer who reported the joke to the press wasn’t bright enough to realise that and, as with everything else these days, the assumption by the Thought Police (see the novel, “1984”) was that the joke was an example of racial discrimination based on colour. What complete nonsense. With hindsight perhaps it would have been more politically correct and acceptable if the monkey had been described as albino!

All that aside, the story doesn’t reflect well upon the team’s spirit and morale ahead of what will be an extremely difficult tournament involving at least a dozen teams better equipped to win the trophy than England. If I were Hodgson (an undoubtedly decent man) I would leave no stone unturned in my efforts to find the Judas who betrayed his manager and thus his team-mates in such a scurrilous and cowardly manner. I would then make it clear to him that he will never again be selected to play for England whilst I remained manager. Go on Mr Hodgson, seek him out. The huge chip on his shoulder should make him readily identifiable.