Tomorrow is World Naked Gardening Day.

Advisory: Naked gardeners whom you may not wish to see naked.

(Thanks to Suzie Q. Wacvet)

These pointless little boxes merely encourage the afflicted or deluded to indulge in behaviour that is good for no one

As far as grotesque and embarrassing spectacles in British public life are concerned, the antics of the technical area are matched only by those that take place behind the dispatch boxes of the House of Commons. For a normal person, to watch Ed Balls during prime minister's questions, or Mark Hughes flinging his coat around against Newcastle, is not to reflect "we are all in this together" or "thank you for representing me in this manner". It is to wonder: "Where is your carer?"

Had I money to burn, I would hire the obliging former Met chief Lord Stevens to run a reassuringly expensive investigation into the whole business of technical areas, and make it clear to his lordship that the only acceptable conclusion to draw would be that the technical area was a load of complete cobblers, and should be abolished without delay.

Instead, L'affaire Pardew seems to have drawn the investigatory attentions of the League Managers Association, which is apparently involved in a study into the positioning of the technical area, and whether moving it could reduce incidents like the one that has won the Newcastle manager a record-breaking seven-game ban.

"The LMA is currently conducting with a university a look into how the technical area operates – the behaviour, the position and objectives – and also how the fourth official works," the LMA chief executive Richard Bevan told the BBC recently. "We did a technical report six or seven months ago involving 40 referees and 40 managers, looking at how it works in other sports and looking to see if we can improve the positions."

Goodness. I can think of a way they could "improve the positions", and it's inspired by that scene in Tootsie where the producer of the soap opera in which Dorothy Michaels is starring wonders how to shoot her more flatteringly (unaware that Dorothy is in fact a man in drag). "I'd like to make her look a little more attractive," the producer muses to the cameraman. "How far can you pull back?" "How do you feel about Cleveland?" he replies.

So in the event that the technical area could not be absolutely abolished, that is as indulgent a solution as I could countenance: all technical areas, in all football leagues, could be repositioned in Cleveland, Ohio. There could be miles and miles of those pointless little boxes, arranged across the plains, and any manager wishing to keep the old, mad ways would fly over for their match and gesticulate from that distance, safe in the knowledge that it would have precisely the same bearing on the action were he doing it in Middlesbrough as the midwest.

After all, there is a fine line – or maybe a really technical-looking dotted line – between offering support and enabling, and I can't help feeling the LMA will have strayed across it if its verdict is to do anything other than get rid of the technical area entirely. It merely encourages the afflicted or deluded to indulge in behaviour that is good for no one in the long run. As things stand, you can see why any manager might think that normal social rules do not apply to him in the technical area. It is, after all, a mystical space that which he already appears to believe exists outside the laws of physics. It is somewhere he believes himself to possess a remarkable superpower, in that anything he shouts – despite the fact that 30,000 other people are also shouting – can be heard clearly by the person to whom he is shouting it. And, in the case of top secret tactical commands, can be heard only by that person.

The reality – that he might as well put the message in a bottle, instruct an underling to leave the ground to chuck it in the ocean, and hope that a freak tidal wave washes it on to the pitch before full time – is studiously ignored. It would be nice to think that the groundbreaking LMA study might assess whether, in the history of football, the course of a match has ever been meaningfully changed by anything bellowed or gesticulated from the technical area. Football got by without these hallowed boxes for an awfully long time. The only commands usually conveyed with any degree of accuracy are variants on "hurry up" or "slow down", and whether those are worthy of the classification "technical" should be beneath debate.

Should be, but isn't, alas, with the likes of Graham Taylor seemingly illuminating the airwaves daily since the Pardew incident. Now, Graham always seems a nice man. But can it really be right for presenters to allow him to discuss such things without feeling professionally obliged to bring up the small matter of his once giving us his forlornly shell-suited version of King Lear on the heath, railing at a linesman to "tell your mate he's just cost me my job"? Apparently, it can. I suppose we at least we knew what Taylor was saying then, what with his being miked up for adocumentary. a documentary.

But unless all managers are willing to submit to being similarly wired for sound, in the interests of adding to the gaiety of the nation, then please: enough of the technical area madness. Henceforth, if a manager insists on standing on the piece of grass formerly known as the technical area, then he should be permitted to do so only if strapped to a gurney and wearing the Hannibal Lecter mask. Discussing a possible transfer to a conventional prison is optional.

For 35 years, Florida has been trying to execute Freddie Lee Hall, who is mentally disabled and has been his whole life.

Land of Passion.

(Thanks to Unholy Slacker)

The 2022 World Cup is being built by slaves in a non-democracy, but that's not the issue for Sepp Blatter and co

The indispensable English footballer whose metatarsal will snap four weeks before the 2022 World Cup is currently 12 years old, but Fifa is already worrying stagily about the temperature in which he will perform disappointingly. As for the 12-year-old Nepalese boy whose family are unwittingly saving for the chance to send him off in a few years to die laying the foundations of a stadio-mall, or the 12-year-old Qatari boy wondering not when his people voted for this, but whether they'll ever vote for anything at all … well, it would be much easier if people did not concern themselves with them.

The greatest trick Fifa ever pulled – or at the very least, one of their top 10 – is acting as though the big question mark over the Qatar World Cup is the weather. By hook and by crooks, a brilliant piece of misdirection has seen almost the entire discussion centred on a roastingly heated debate about the tournament shifting seasons.

I'm not totally across the rules of apocalypse bingo. But I'm pretty sure that the second that people care more about how a winter World Cup will affect the Champions League schedule than the fact it's being built by slaves in a non-democracy, we all move closer to a full house.

A Guardian investigation has uncovered abuse of migrant workers in Qatar, with huge numbers dying, and working practices in various infrastructure projects amounting to modern-day slavery. Like Captain Renault in the Casablanca gambling den, Fifa professes itself shocked – shocked! – to find this going on in Qatar; and you, wide-eyed readers, will very likely have spent much of the week on the smelling salts yourself. In fact, I can't decide whether I am more shocked by the discovery that workers are appallingly exploited in these building binges in the emirates, or the discovery that summer in Qatar is quite warm.

Yet even I can't synthesise surprise at leaks from this week's Fifa meeting in Zurich, which indicate they will stick with Qatar for 2022, and not reopen the dubious vote to allow wishy-washy non-authoritarian states another chance. Apologies for the repetition, but Fifa is much less of an international sporting administrator than it is a supranational privateer. It is a parasite body, which descends on the appropriately named "host" nation every four years, siphons billions of tax-free profit out of it at the same time as overriding its laws and constitution to suit its needs, before buggering off in search of new blood. What on earth does anyone imagine it wants with democracies?

But please don't take it from me – Fifa itself is increasingly clear on the matter. "I will say something crazy," declared its chillingly sane secretary general, Jérôme Valcke, back in April, "but less democracy is sometimes better for organising a World Cup." A statement that should for ever lay to rest Fifa's nonsense about the tournament's power to change the world for good.

Far from being the catalyst for progress its corporate folklore always holds it to be, the World Cup is in the gift of those irked by so-called advances for the little people – democracy, say, or the right to protest – and who believe it much better staged where those required to pay for it are voiceless.

Or, as Valcke added: "When you have a very strong head of state who can decide, as maybe Putin can do in 2018, that is easier for us organisers than a country such as Germany … where you have to negotiate at different levels."

How trying it must be. Happily, South Africa – Fifa's most recent ATM – rolled over very easily in 2010, with the scale of their obedience so total that Blatter was sufficiently emboldened to put the recently bereaved Nelson Mandela under "extreme pressure" to show himself at the final. As I say, I don't play apocalypse bingo. But if you had your dabber in your hand, the moment Sepp Blatter successfully pulled rank on the unofficial elder of the entire global village was probably one to cross off.

As for the demonstrations in Brazil ahead of next year's tournament, Blatter seems nostalgic for simpler South American times.

"I was happy Argentina won," he declared of the victorious hosts of the 1978 World Cup, held under military government. "This was a kind of reconciliation with the public, of the people of Argentina, with the system, the political system, the military system at the time." Mmm. Perhaps when Herr Blatter finally retires, having held power longer than most dictators, he could write a musical entitled Oh, What A Lovely Dirty War!

What a historian he is, and we can only imagine the spin he will put on the deaths of those labourers in Qatar in 10 years' time. They were not slaves – they were freedom fighters in the unimpeachable cause of football's mission to build a better tomorrow. Or a better food court, or something.

The one thing we'll never hear, of course, is a decent argument for why on earth non-democracies are even eligible to bid for Fifa's bauble – yet no attempt to get us to chat about the weather should stop this fundamental question being asked of Fifa at every turn. After all, if hosting an Olympics or a World Cup were even remotely likely to advance the cause of human freedom in their countries, does anyone think the likes of China and Qatar would be as keen to host them as they are?

Twitter: @marinahyde

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