Fabio Capello came out this week and in amongst various other excuses blamed the new Adidas Jabulani ball for the lack of goals from England players. This seems a terrible flawed argument - it is so very easy to argue that all the teams are playing with the same ball (which England goalkeeper David James has suggested himself).  Most other major teams are managing to score, unlike England, particularly in the almost unwatchably execrable game against Algeria on Friday night.  Germany said they had been practising with the ball for 6 months, and they won 4-0.

At the World Cup, all the players will have been playing with a pretty much identical ball for most of their life. Passing, shooting heading, the same football for all that time, hours each day each week each month each year for as many as ten, fifteen, or twenty years. With the same ball. Millions of touches, tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions. With a normal ball, not the magical new Jabulani ball.

Imagine you are lining up to kick a ball from the corner of the penalty area. It’s easy enough to side-foot it into the goal from there. However, once you imagine a keeper is occupying the middle of the goal, you have to now aim the ball at the edges of the goal to increase the chances of actually scoring. Now explain to someone with no idea of football (perhaps an American) how to score that goal, past a keeper. It’s almost impossible. The nuances of how to stroke the ball are so subtle -  to get it towards the goal at a sensible pace, fast enough to out-pace the keeper, not so hard it soars over the goal, still not compromising the direction of the shot, or curling the ball away from the goal or back towards the keeper, it’s horribly difficult.

One of the great things about football is that it’s open to anyone on earth. All you need is a ball. And only one ball allows 22 people to play the game. And that’s brilliant. Sadly this simplicity always seems to be the excuse FIFA hide behind in consistently ruling out technology in the elite game with goal-line cameras, etc. So the one bit of kit - is the ball. And FIFA have meddled with that one bit of kit in making a new super-aerodynamic super-sleek super-round ball.

Imagine the pure unadulterated joy, making it to the world cup finals, tens and tens of millions of kicks learning all those subtle nuances of how to control a ball, only for some twat to issue with a new curious shaped ball. With different aerodynamic properties, it’s obviously going to fly differently, and until strikers get used to them (if they do manage to learn how to coax it goalwards during the maximum 8 matches they have) we’d probably do better trying to dribble the ball into the back of the net.

For once, genuinely this one time ever, I’m going to side with the footballers. They have a point*.

*(as do Algeria now, thanks to our performance).