A few years ago, back in London, Arthur Smith—a stand-up comic and sometime colleague of mine—hit upon the idea of writing a play set during the England/Germany match in the 1990 World Cup, one of those rare occasions when London’s streets fall eerily silent because everyone’s indoors glued to the telly. The play was called An Evening with Gary Lineker, after the celebrated English footballer, who doesn’t actually appear in the work except, unseen by the audience, on the television set round which the principals are eagerly clustered. The evening was a huge hit in the West End and, in appropriately localized versions, in most other countries where soccer means anything. But the sterner critics were nonetheless aggrieved: this was such a good idea they seemed resentful my pal Arthur had got to it first. If only David Hare/ Caryl Churchill/Howard Brenton/Alan Ayckbourn/you name ’em had beaten Arthur to the punch, then the text might have used this crystallizing moment in the national cavalcade to explore notions of identity/explore notions of maleness/explore notions of class/insert favorite notion here. Instead, Arthur had had his original notion and more or less left it at that.

You can see their points: the incontinent old hog snuffles out the best truffle in the wood while the experts are still ambling out the gates. But it’s useless to complain: better playwrights would have done more with it, but he got to it and they didn’t. As the relevant sections of the federal code