TWADDLE

'Rabid nationalism is dead or at least resting. For that, thank David Beckham,
whose captaincy may have changed for ever how English football looks.
Obviously, it's not just down to him. The team he leads seems bereft of the
wife-beaters, cokeheads and bad drunks on whom England's reputation once
depended, but Beckham is the moderniser. Despised for his vulgar wedding
to Posh Spice and so reviled for his petulance in the last World Cup that he
was hung in effigy, he has become the authentic working-class hero and
meritocrat who loves his wife, dotes on his child, keeps in touch with his gas-
fitter mate from Essex, shops at M&S and wouldn't launch a range of designer
sunglasses without inviting his gran along.

From there, it was a short step to deity. Beckham's statue has been cast in
gold for a Thai temple and moulded in wax for the Madame Tussaud's replica
which was set on a plinth in Trafalgar Square last week. His metatarsal was
invested with a sacred significance unseen since St Francis of Assisi acquired
stigmata. Even if nothing in his history brands Beckham as much more than
the hallucination of a feverish nation, his talent for political delivery is
impressive.

In an evolutionary lurch too startling for Darwinian gradualists, Beckham has
catapulted football out of the world of Betty and Barney Rubbleand into the
feminist fringes. A task that once seemed as impossible as a feng shui
makeover on the Augean stables has been accomplished in a fortnight.
Assuming no trouble for the rest of the tournament, Mr Hooligan has been
vanquished, or suppressed, while the less oafish are correspondingly
transformed.

Perhaps. Abolishing the macho culture of football is an alchemy beyond the
grasp of publicists. Combining the fissile ingredients of partisanship and
multicultural goodwill is cleverer still. Such skills offer a chillier message to our
remaindered icons. For a footballer to command more trust than God,
government and the House of Windsor combined may imply a reborn sense of
Englishness.'