Brian Viner: Zen-Ruffinen and the art of the World Cup variety show

Anyone still awake after the one-man opera was surely lulled off by a speech by Sepp Blatter

There is an immutable law in football which decrees that, if history can possibly repeat itself, it will. This phenomenon, which I will call Rennies Law – after the indigestion tablets rather than the referee – has been in force for decades.

For example, in the 1955-56 season, Leeds United were drawn at home against Cardiff City in the third round of the FA Cup, and Cardiff won 2-1. Remarkably, in the 1956-57 FA Cup, Leeds and Cardiff again met in the third round, again at Elland Road, and again Cardiff won 2-1. The following January, in the third round of the 1957-58 FA Cup, Rennies Law intensified. Leeds drew Cardiff at home yet again. And the scoreline? But of course, a 2-1 away win. And so to Saturday's World Cup draw in the South Korean city of Pusan, which was covered live by BBC Television.

We students of Rennies Law knew full well that England would wind up in a group with one or other of its bêtes noires in major tournaments, Argentina or Germany. Moreover, since a branch of Rennies Law decrees that irony always looms as large as it possibly can, we should also have anticipated that England's opening match would be against Sven Goran Eriksson's native Sweden.

Saturday's event did have its surprising dimensions, however. For one thing, it was a surprise that the organisers managed to squeeze the World Cup draw into what was otherwise a South Korean version of Sunday Night at the London Palladium.

This was their country's moment in the global spotlight and they were damned if they were going to let football get in the way. Accordingly, the World Cup draw kicked off with the Pusan City Orchestra and Metropolitan Chorus performing the fourth movement of Beethoven's ninth symphony. Actually, this was not as incongruous as it might once have seemed. After all, football's relationship with high culture was born more than 10 years ago at Italia 90, when millions of us discovered that Nessun Dorma was not, as we had previously supposed, a make of Japanese camper van.

Besides, the Pusan Metropolitan Chorus played a blinder, indeed their performance cried out for some expert analysis from John Motson back in the studio. "All singing from the same songsheet quite marvellously there," Motty might have said, but disappointingly it became gradually apparent that he was saving himself for the footie. Saving himself, in fact, to point out that the Africans were the dark horses of the World Cup, to the stifled amusement of Ray Stubbs and Mark Lawrenson alongside him.

Back in Pusan, the show moved on to a Korean one-man opera. At first I thought this might be football-related, given that the closest thing I had ever seen in this country to a one-man opera was a football match, any football match, refereed by David Elleray. But no. This one-man opera, we were reliably informed by the commentator Barry Davies, was about the daughter of a blind man who offers herself as a sacrifice to ensure the safe passage of a ship.

As urbane and culturally aware as Davies is, he probably never expected his World Cup commentating duties to embrace the daughter of a blind man offering herself as a sacrifice to ensure the safe passage of a ship. But then if Vinnie Jones can sing to the Queen as part of a tribute to Andrew Lloyd-Webber, as happened in last week's Royal Variety Performance, then anything can happen. And in Pusan, anything, if not everything, did.

After the lifetime span of a smallish animal, however, they finally got down to football business. But this was only the end of the beginning, not the beginning of the end. Anyone in the auditorium still awake after the one-man opera was surely lulled off by a speech by the Fifa president, Sepp Blatter, plainly a man in love with his own vocal chords. Only then did the main event finally get under way.

The draw was hosted by another Fifa dignitary, Michael Zen-Ruffinen, whose manual "Zen-Ruffinen and the art of World Cup draws" should soon be available in all good bookshops. Every good variety show needs a Brucie, and Zen-Ruffinen, explaining the significance of E4 and A3, and why B2 was incompatible with C1, presided with Brucie-like geniality over what basically amounted to a vast game of Battleships.

By the end of it all, England had just about the toughest draw possible. Still, Adam Crozier, of the Football Association, had at least digested some more useful lessons about how they go about things overseas, football-wise, notably that the forthcoming draw for the third round of the FA Cup will feel like a thoroughly inadequate affair unless it is prefaced by a song by Atomic Kitten, a couple of excerpts from My Fair Lady, a poetry reading by Stephen Fry, and 20 minutes of morris dancing.

b.viner@independent.co.uk