World Cup 2022 in Qatar is built around corruption, myths and lies Three Novembers later, we see incontrovertibly that the basis of Qatar's bid for 2022 was specious. "Revolutionary aircooling technology," to somehow protect players and spectators from potentially lethal temperatures was a fantasy to ease the passage of a bid which many Exco members had mysteriously decided to support while ignoring their own technical report. Fifa's chief medical officer, Professor Jiri Dvorak, has concluded that there is a "highly critical risk" to players, officials and fans between June and August, and a borderline risk between May and September. Since January and February 2022 would clash with the Winter Olympics, a process of elimination is steering the first Middle East World Cup to November and December 2022, which will play havoc with the global club calendar. Qatar, who persisted with the fallacy that a summer World Cup was feasible, and who face yet more ordure over migration worker deaths and alleged funding for Isis in Iraq and Syria, has now miraculously come round to the logic of a winter tournament. Fifa says it has now been told by the Qataris that "for the Middle East, the ideal situation and circumstances for an all-inclusive World Cup would be for it to be held in the winter." So there you have it: a World Cup bid that was based on the impossible, voted for despite its impossibility, and then abandoned in favour of a different tournament altogether, while football trembles on the edge of a decision it has to take to avoid destroying the credibility of its greatest event. That move would be to rescind Qatar's victory in the 2022 race and start the process again. Even Emirates, a Middle Eastern airline, has had enough, pulling out of Fifa sponsorship while Qatar Airways enters talks with Sepp Blatter's firm (according to Germany's Der Spiegel). How cosy that would be. It will be a cold day in hell before sponsors provide an ethical lead, and nor should we expect them to, since the rule of law should be good enough. The Qatar World Cup has hung for too long on Fifa's own in-house and secretive "ethics committee" report into the 2018 and 2022 bids, which looks like an exercise in obfuscation and delay, whatever the good intentions of Michael Garcia, the lead investigator, who wants the report to be published. A limited and flawed internal audit should not inhibit national federations and the European leagues, who have enough material already to justify a revolt. The pivotal moment was the acceptance that Qatar's Summer World Cup bid was false from the outset, and therefore invalid now. With that fact so brutally clear, why should the Premier League, Bundesliga and La Liga (all the leagues, in fact) rip up a calendar to accommodate a World Cup that is built around corruption, myths and lies? There is no moral or professional duty to support this charade. Qatar's Winter Wonderland? Just say no. More an heir to Piggott than a chip off the old block The Jordi Cruyff curse was never going to hang over Ryan Moore, widely regarded as the world's best Flat race rider, whose father Gary came off at "every fence and hurdle round Plumpton" in his days as a journeyman jump jockey. Unlike Jordi, whose dad Johan set the bar impossible high, Ryan has easily surpassed the achievements of his sire. With his Melbourne Cup win on Protectionist, Moore jnr has won 19 Group 1 races in 12 months, in eight countries on four continents. Few now dispute the theory that he is the best Flat race jock since the great Lester Piggott, with whom he shares a latent for inscrutability. Gary Moore may have been a battered slogger around National Hunt "gaff" tracks but he happens now to train the champion two-mile chaser, Sire De Grugy, whose Cheltenham win last March was a throwback to a more romantic age. Not forgetting Josh, Hayley, Jamie and Candy - all talented riders. From Plumpton to Cheltenham and Melbourne the Moore family have it all sewn up. Ryan, though, is the one earning eulogies for a skill Piggott was the master of: that of coolness and calculation, however disorientating the hurly-burly, however great the prize. Passion killers The economic and logistical reasons for the drop in "passion" at Premier League grounds are easy to spot: high ticket prices, ridiculous kick-off times, weekend engineering works and the M6. Much harder to pin down are the cultural shifts that are turning the average football fan into the consumer of an entertainment experience. "Gentrification" is often blamed but even fans of 30-years experience appear to be less animated. Sunday's Manchester derby was the quietest I can remember covering. Extracting spite and tribalism is hardly a bad thing. But the hush identified by Jose Mourinho is vaguely troubling. It points to a sort of detachment, or a theatre-going outlook. It may even point to a kind of jaundice.