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It used to be said that what was good for would be good for America. This was not a statement of corporate arrogance but more of an observation that the world's largest company and the world's largest economy had mutual interests.

Until recently I thought a similar goose/gander connection existed between the and . A symbiotic win-win if ever there was one.

O to live in such simple times! These days, than sustain it and the Premier League's commitment to the Football Association-led World Cup campaign is looking increasingly half-hearted.

That is a crying shame because England has everything it takes to stage a superb tournament, as will be demonstrated when the .

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There is a moment in , Pete Davies' fly-on-the-wall account of England's 1990 World Cup campaign, when tells the author that his numerous critics in the media would be shot as traitors "if this was a war".

I was reminded of this a fortnight ago when I asked , the chairman of England's bid to stage the , how he thought the bid was going - "much better than our colleagues in the media believe", was his reply.

All of us who would like to see the world's greatest football competition staged in this country again should pray the good lord is right, because this bid is bust if the British media is correct. A dripping tap of negativity became a last week when the bid team gathered for what looked like the dictionary definition of a crisis meeting.

But before we get to what happened there, we should ask a more pertinent question: how did a rock-solid bid, which ticks so many boxes, lose the home front?

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Perhaps the worst row I've had in my scribbling career came when a press officer at a club accused me of racism.

We had written a story about whatever issue everybody was talking about that week and buried the launch of an anti-racism rap that had been recorded by a couple of the team's players. To give that story secondary importance was racist, the PR man claimed. I disagreed and tempers flared.

But nobody likes being called a racist. Even racists prefer to be called something else, something less nasty, less ugly. That is why I'm not going to accuse English football of racism - it would be as unreasonable as that press officer's rant.

So I'm just going to note two numbers: 23 and three. The first is the percentage of footballers in the top four divisions who are black, and the second is the number of black managers working at that level. That's three out of 92, basically 3%. Does that sound right to you? Cards on table time: it does not sound right to me.

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