hopes
Neal Collins
I have a picture in my head of Oceania’s Fifa delegate Charles Dempsey that I am finding hard to shift. Purely fictional of course, but it could just serve to explain how the Germans managed to grab the World Cup from the dark continent at the last possible moment.
Dreamlike, I can see the Scots-born 78- year-old standing in his hotel room in Zurich. About him there is chaos. The phone is ringing, he knows it’s Nelson Mandela demanding a vote for South Africa. His cellphone is vibrating, he knows it’s his Sports Minister, Trevor Mallard, demanding a vote for South Africa. Under the door a fax appears, purporting to be from a Herr Martin Hansen (telephone number 0049-69-707 903 91, and I’m not joking, he really is on the end of it, give it a go) who is offering unspecified gifts in return for a vote for Germany.
A hoax, grins Dempsey, wiping e-mails from President Thabo Mbeki, Fifa boss Sepp Blatter and any number of others off his laptop. There are messages from Bobby Charlton and Geoff Hurst too, but he has long since learned to ignore those Sassenach bastards.
Dempsey is in a quandary. Stones rattle his window pane. It’s Mandela’s rather attractive female bodyguard. She too wishes to garner a vote for the continent which is starved of so much, which deserves a break.
With a sigh, Dempsey goes through the voting patterns once more. First round, out goes Morocco. Second round, whoops, there go the bloody English. Then it’s 12-12, because Charlie knows the Oceania meeting in Samoa last May demanded he switch allegiances to South Africa once lout-infested England fell predictably by the wayside.
Dempsey sighs. And turns to his bed. Tomorrow the big vote. Oh! Would they be angry when they heard that he planned to abstain in the third round, preventing that nasty little Swiss roll Sepp Blatter from clinching the 2006 World Cup for South Africa with his casting vote.
“Come darling,” says the husky come-to-bed supermodel voice with a tell-tale German accent. “Ja Fraulein, ich komen,” growls the Scots Kiwi, the years falling off him.
“Claudia Schiffer 1, Nelson Mandela 0,” laughed Charlie as he leapt into action, not the most abstemious of World Cup abstainers.