Self-inflicted karma

England already doesn't have a poet laureate and now it has lost its football team manager as well. Neither Ted Hughes nor Glenn Hoddle w...

England already doesn8217;t have a poet laureate and now it has lost its football team manager as well. Neither Ted Hughes nor Glenn Hoddle was much loved while he played his part. The former was vilified for killing8217; a wife who stuck her own head in the oven and the latter because he believes the disabled are disadvantaged.

None of it is surprising, really. Tolerance does have another meaning in the sceptred isle obviously. It means tolerating everything except what seems intolerable on a given day. This day it was Hoddle.

The Football Association sacked him because his position had become 8220;untenable8221;. But scant attention was paid to the fact that the position had indeed become untenable because in the span of a week Hoddle went from an innocuous one-to-one newspaper interview to playing the star role in a media circus. All for saying: 8220;You and I have been physically given two hands and two legs and half decent brains. Some people have not been born like that for a reason. The karma is working fromanother lifetime.8221;

Now, Hoddle fans there are a few still left must be hoping that the former football manager believes in the karma theory strongly enough to realise that his is working from another life too. And some from this life as well. After all, Hoddle is the man who lost England the World Cup.

But that8217;s not why the guardian of the national sport has gone from a 350,000 pounds a year salary to a 500,000 pounds settlement. It8217;s because he has the wrong beliefs in completely the wrong country. In England, Tony Blair holds the monopoly on potty ideas. Soon after the British prime minister moved house, it was reported that he had called in a Feng Shui consultant to move the furniture around in Downing Street.

And it didn8217;t end with the tables and chairs either. Last week, another Feng Shui expert, Renuka Wickmaratne, advised the Labour government on how to improve inner-city council estates: 8220;Red and orange flowers in the flower-bed reduce crime, and introducing a water feature would reducepoverty.8221; She added: 8220;I was brought up with this ancient knowledge.8221; Balmy Blair was obviously reassured by this last comment but is the suggestion that fountains are a substitute for living wage less absurd than Hoddle the Horrible8217;s belief in reincarnation.

For meeting real freaks Hoddle-bashers should have paid a visit to Heaven8217;s Gate at San Diego. That is before all of them committed suicide to hasten the meeting with their Maker.

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But then England is the sort of place where a baby-killing nanny called Louise Woodward is given a hero8217;s welcome but a karma-believing manager must pay for his words.

Actually he should have paid for his actions. The man who abdicated responsibility for David Beckham8217;s foul and David Batty8217;s missed penalty should have gone in the summer of last year. And no one should have been allowed to doubt that Hoddle is actually the champion of his physically challenged brethren. Anyone who played a thoroughly challenged Paul Gascoigne through injury, drunkenness andwife-beating is obviously a great lover of the disabled.

And the rate at which he saved the English forward Michael Owen during matches would have made you believe that the young sensation was actually wheelchair-bound. Hoddle8217;s most crackers idea is not his belief in faith-healer Eileen Drewery but his faith in ageing, injury-prone Alan Shearer as the most prolific goal-scorer for his country.

But all is not lost for England8217;s most famous ex. Hoddle must know that he could still have a career in India 8212; after all he8217;s come up with the best excuse yet for why Indians are only ever competing against itself.