Published: 19 June, 2014
By RICHARD OSLEY

A WORLD Cup will not be a truly great World Cup for those of us committed to 1am bedtimes unless we identify who our panto baddies are this summer.  

This will be the team which dives or fouls or gives fair play a cock-faced wink and then handles the ball into the goal or off the line. We seek not to besmirch an entire nation here. Obviously the character of a country’s population is not told by the ill-repute of their national football team. But there needs to be baddies to overcome for a World Cup to feel like the greatest movie of all time that we want it to be.

Like Maradona’s Argentina were in 1986, just as soon as they pulled off the Keyser Soze of all-time handballs, and celebrated like this had all been OK.

When they were beaten by Cameroon in the first game of the next World Cup it felt like the law of come-uppance had finally jolted into place, like Mumm-Ra had been flattened. 

It was then time for the Germans to step in as our new favourite bad guys. Their crime was winning on penalties and worst still, Jurgen Klinsmann’s “simulation”. We laugh about it now, because he laughs about it now, and a bit of north London likes what he did at Spurs. For the rest of us there’s now a stunning US-German hybrid accent to marvel at. But his gymnastics when pricked by a blade of grass were actually mighty hard to stomach and it felt great when his cads were undone by Bulgaria – that bald guy with the flying header – in USA '94. 

We all eventually tired too of the cocksure winning French team – to the extent that by the time the World Cup landed in South Africa there was sparse sympathy for their playground arguments and threats to strike.

Winning too often can get you that nobody-likes-you label, and if it wasn’t for the sheer beauty of Spain’s passing game, they might have suffered the same fate more recently. 

Ready, almost delighted, to take their place, were the filthy Dutch karate kickers of 2010. As much as we all secretly love Holland’s kits, it had become a case of anybody but Van Bommel and we smiled when he (they) lost to Spain.

So what the wonderful World Cup unfolding in Brazil really needs now is a big bad bully which is felled in a way the world cheers together. 

There was a sense of this on Saturday when ickle Costa Rica defeated Uruguay, for whom we still haven’t really forgiven for halting “plucky” Ghana in 2010 with a cynical goal-line handball and the sight of Luis Suarez dancing on the touchline, cackling at his evil plan. Note this column is written before these rotters-elect play England, a match in which Uruguay can attain legendary bad-guy status. Until then, all we can offer is Honduras, for clattering people and chasing 0-0s. 

But boring the pub with how much you want Honduras to lose simply won’t do. We need a moment of outrage from one of the big boys for us to feel the togetherness Diego gave us in 1986 and Jurgen in 1990.