Brian Viner: Football becomes the universal language

Last week I took out for lunch the television presenter and animal behaviour expert Charlotte Uhlenbroek, which was a delightful if occasionally disconcerting experience, as I kept wondering whether my mastication technique might put her in mind of, say, the ring-tailed lemur.

Anyway, Charlotte told me that last year, when she and a camera team were travelling through a remote mountain range in northern Ethiopia in pursuit of the gelada baboons, they came across an eight-year-old shepherd boy tending his flock on a high plateau.

"He was wearing a beige-coloured, coarse woollen hat, which looked very stylish but very itchy," said Charlotte. "He tried to sell it to me but I wasn't keen. So he said: 'Give it to David Beckham'. Isn't that incredible? He wouldn't have had a clue who Tony Blair was, but he knew about Beckham." I told Charlotte that her story reminded me of a snippet of news I read years ago, reporting that a Bedouin tribe had delayed for 24 hours the previously sacrosanct date of its annual migration across the Sahara, so that the tribe's elders could watch the last episode of Dallas.

But even that seems less improbable than a shepherd boy in northern Ethiopia – "about as remote as you can get," said Charlotte – trying to send his hat to Beckham. In fact, Charlotte wrote down for him an approximation of the great man's address, and told him that as she was going to be hanging out with gelada baboons for the forseeable future, he should send the hat himself when he reached the nearest town, which was about 10 days' walk away.

All of which is very interesting indeed if you saw the undoubtedly trendy, slightly odd, decidedly beige-coloured headgear that Beckham was sporting while watching the Manchester United v Bayer Leverkusen match at Old Trafford last Wednesday. If you did, you will perhaps agree with me that the shepherd boy's parcel must have arrived.

Whatever, that a shepherd boy in northern Ethiopia can establish a rapport with a camera crew from England simply by mentioning David Beckham demonstrates football's stature as a global language, a stature about to receive its four-yearly boost from the World Cup.

A few weeks ago I was in a Madrid restaurant where, at the end of a long, boozy lunch (by which time my mastication technique might have reminded even a non-animal behaviourist of a ring-tailed lemur, to say nothing of a gelada baboon) I was introduced to the elderly proprietor, who spoke not a word of English beyond a series of proper nouns. "Bobby Charlton," he said to me.

"Geoff Hurst. Bobby Moore. Georgie Best. Gazza. Martin Peters." Assuming him to be a Real Madrid fan, and remembering from my O-levels only one line of Spanish ("tengo un baul y dos maletas", which means I have a trunk and two suitcases, and is of frustratingly limited value even when travelling through a Spanish-speaking country) I replied in kind. "Alfredo di Stefano," I said. "Ferenc Puskas. Günter Netzer. Paul Breitner. Zinedine Zidane." The restaurant proprietor beamed. "Denis Law. Kevin Keegan. Sir Alf Ramsey," he replied. It was like being in a Two Ronnies sketch, except that we conversed along these lines for fully 20 minutes, as animatedly as if we were talking in the same language about Basque terrorists, or the merits of the euro, or Julia Roberts.

I wonder which other names, come the end of June, will break language barriers in this way? Is it fanciful to imagine a Spanish restaurateur, or for that matter an Ethiopian shepherd boy, clasping a passing Englishman by the hand, looking him in the eye, and saying, with a broad smile: "Philip Neville"? I fear it is, but you never know.

In the meantime, it seems scarcely believable that by the end of this week the World Cup will be less than a month away. Scarcely believable, too, but for an entirely different reason, that by the end of this week the FA Cup final will be done and dusted. There was a time, even in World Cup year, when the impending prospect of the Cup final gripped me like an unusually possessive octopus. Now, I couldn't care less, and that's because I have come to realise that the FA Cup, unlike the World Cup, can be bought.

No? Then consider which are the highest-spending clubs in the land. Arsenal, Chelsea, Manchester United and Liverpool, I think you'll find. And for the last decade – with the single exception of Everton in 1995, heaven and Paul Rideout be praised – no club other than Arsenal, Chelsea, Manchester United and Liverpool has won the Cup, a dispiriting sequence that will not end on Saturday. In protest, I might even not watch, especially if I can find a good wildlife documentary on the other side, preferably about gelada baboons.

b.viner@independent.co.uk