The crusader who staggered out of Doha's Red Lion just before the gates closed was actually no hallucination.

He later complained on television about stadium harassment.

"We are football," he said, thankfully meaning the fans and not the English.

The English fans are always obsessed with history.

Christopher Ehrhardt

Correspondent for the Arab countries based in Beirut.

  • Follow I follow

But the Crusaders?

Come on, Mate!

That was maybe a bit too forgetful of history.

Even if the crusaders had only made it as far as the Levant in their campaign against the Muslims - and some contemporary descriptions breathe the spirit of amazement with which one looks at the British Qatar drivers here on the Gulf.

How good that they exist!

Every day here, you tiptoe through a moral minefield.

Just don't understand the Qataris too well.

Just don't enjoy yourself too much.

Just don't annoy the Qataris.

You can blow through in the English slipstream.

Even in Qatar, where there are English people, it's always like England, which makes it much easier to behave appropriately.

The best World Cup ambassadors?

The English defy the home press, which suggests they might as well have traveled to Germany for the 1936 Olympics (just moving them retrospectively from Berlin to Munich).

They don't complain that the beer is so expensive it's so hard to find.

You just drink it.

They also don't mind that the bars here have the coolness of large-capacity discos in the provinces.

After all, they have names like "The Red Lion" and it's very English there at a late hour.

Incidentally, the English also provide the best World Cup ambassadors in history: two lads from Liverpool who go beer hunting and are picked up and invited by a real sheikh.

He had monkeys and a lion cub and a "Lambo" (Lamborghini), the boys announce in a video of their adventure and in an accent that cannot be reproduced here onomatopoeic.

In any case, the story is too good to be true, which of course immediately raises the suspicion that petrodollars are involved.

But even if it was a clandestine PR campaign: once, at least once, the Qataris would have done everything right.