Brian Viner: Nothing is new under World Cup's rising sun

An expression much used by sports writers these past few days is "phoney war". It relates to the winter of 1939-40, when Britain and France on the one hand, and Germany on the other, with hostilities formally declared, did not actually fight each other much. Instead, there was an awful lot of discussion about what had happened already, and speculation about what might happen next. And so busy were the British and French with all this chin-wagging, that they clean took their eyes off the ball.

Which brings us to the phoney World Cup, as l'affaire Roy Keane vies for column inches with l'affaire Beckham's left foot. And let's not forget Trevor Sinclair's air miles and the scrapping Swedes.

Was a football tournament ever so analysed and deconstructed before a competitive ball was kicked? This World Cup has already been the subject of more post-mortems than there are in a month of dramas about police pathologists starring Amanda Burton, with the effect that Friday's opening game, between France and Senegal, is likely to come as something of a shock to the system.

Still, in football as in international diplomacy, nothing is new under the rising sun. Those of us whose memories stretch back to Argentina '78 remember Willie Johnston's premature trip home causing just as big a rumpus as Keane's.

Admittedly, that happened once the tournament had begun, and for different reasons. Johnston's urine sample revealed traces of a banned stimulant, Fencamfamin, whereas if Keane had peed into a test tube – and I would not have wanted to be the one to ask – it would merely have shown excessive levels of bile, by no means desirable but not yet illegal.

All the same, there are many parallels between the two unhappy expulsions.

Certainly, as off-the-field images go, those offending yellow tablets, slowly melting in a sweaty palm, remain as evocative of World Cups past as the picture of a bemused Bobby Moore, arrested for "stealing" a bracelet in Colombia; as evocative as the image of Keane striding through an airport terminal, his dark eyes glittering with fury and frustration, will one day become.

But just as nothing is ever new, it is conversely said that the past is a foreign country, they do things differently there. In which case 1978, in certain regards, equates to inner Mongolia.

For one thing, in 1978 there were hardly any overseas players in the Football League. But that year's World Cup changed everything. It is hard now, with foreign players and managers 10 a euro in British football, to feel the seismic shockwaves generated by the news in August 1978 that the dapper little Argentinian, Osvaldo Ardiles, was leaving his club, the exotic-sounding Huracan, to ply his trade in north London.

When Bobby Robson bought Dutchman Arnold Muhren from Twente Enschede a week later, Tottenham Hotspur and Ipswich Town could suddenly boast two of the most stylish players from the World Cup's two most successful teams.

Revolution was in the air, not to mention a great deal of torn paper, as Spurs fans welcomed Ardiles, and his friend Ricardo Villa, with the joyous ticker-tape receptions accorded the Argentina team in Buenos Aires.

Not everyone approved. The cleaners at White Hart Lane, for example. Gordon Taylor of the Professional Footballers' Association started getting hot under what in 1978 was doubtless a sizeable collar, saying: "Whatever way you look at it, there could already be two English players out of a job at Tottenham because of the Argentinians." But increasingly the foreign players came. Ivan Golac, the Partizan Belgrade defender, joined unfashionable Southampton for £50,000. Manchester City bought Kazimierz Deyna, capped 102 times for Poland. And Bobby Robson went double Dutch (not for the last time), buying Muhren's classy compatriot Frans Thijssen.

The Dutch might be better known for sticking their fingers in dykes than helping to nudge open floodgates, but gradually a trickle of foreign footballers into English football became a rush, and eventually a flood. And if you'll forgive me for squeezing out one more aquatic metaphor, the 1978 World Cup was the watershed.

How times have changed. Of the 32 teams in the 2002 World Cup, 22 feature players who earn their corn in England, including China (Sun Jihai of Manchester City), Cameroon (Lauren of Arsenal), Japan (Kawaguchi of Portsmouth) and Ecuador (Delgado of Southampton). And there are other curiosities, too. Of Friday's adversaries, the Senegal squad contains 21 players who play their domestic football in France; the French squad, four.

Weird. But then there was until Thursday one squad with more England-based players than England. The Republic of Ireland 23 were all recruited from the Premiership and Football League, whereas England's Owen Hargreaves plays for Bayern Munich.

That little statistical anomaly was crunched underfoot by Roy Keane as he marched out of the Irish camp, towards what future we can't be sure, but almost certainly not, like Willie Johnston, to a future involving only seven teeth and a pub in Kirkcaldy.

b.viner@independent.co.uk