Day 7: Tunisia v Australia, Poland v Saudi Arabia, France v Denmark and Argentina v Mexico

And Day 8: Japan v Costa Rica, Belgium v Morocco, Croatia v Canada, & Spain v Germany

Hypocrisy comes in as many shades as a rainbow flag. If you want an example of it, you would do well to find one better than Piers Morgan. On the 2nd June 2015 Piers tweeted: “Russia & Qatar must have their World cups removed. Both bids mired in sleaze & corruption via Blatter & his FIFA cronies”. A tweet which he has since deleted.

Piers has since taken a nice pay cheque to go and work in Qatar, he posted a photo of himself flying out to Qatar, his feet up, literally, on the furniture. And while doing so he has mocked the BBC for virtue-signalling. He also mocked the FA for the decision to not wear the One Love armband, “if you're going to virtue signal, at least have the guts to stick to your principles.”

For someone against virtue-signalling, Piers sure does a lot of it. Perhaps he was confused as to why the FA decided to scrap the armband, because he only deletes tweets he makes when he gets a big bag of Qatari money to do so.

Incidentally, Piers has also been, rightly, critical of Matt Hancock being on the TV show “I'm a Celebrity, get me out of here”, come on Piers, isn't it time we stop the virtue-signalling and just enjoy the competition? If only Matt Hancock had a big pile of money for Piers, ay?

Hypocrisy is a type of logical fallacy. And logical fallacies are useful to know, because logic can help us find the truth, and logical fallacies will take us away from it. When Gianni Infantino said: “I think for what we Europeans have been doing in the last 3,000 years, around the world, we should be apologising for the next 3,000 years before starting to give moral lessons to people.” As well as being factually inaccurate, he was making a logical fallacy based on hypocrisy.

Is it hypocritical of the UK to admonish Qatar for treatment of women, migrant workers and their LGBT+ community, if you consider the UK's enslavement and imperialist past? Or is it useful in a debate to turn the subject of the conversation upon your accuser, and make the story, not about 1000s of modern slaves dying building stadiums in a desert, but about the UK being hypocrites.

Is criticism of Qatar Islamaphobia? You'll be surprised to learn this is another logical fallacy known as the “Ad Hominem” argument. The modern world is full of logic, in the news, on social media, in parliaments and courts. If debate was a game logical fallacies would be fouls, but they only become own goals if you are able to call them out. I highly recommend reading about them.

On the morning of day 7 Saudi Arabia filled my twitter feed. There were rumours that after they had beaten Messi's Argentina, each player would receive a Mercedes. These rumours were of course ridiculous, they will be gifted a Rolls Royce.

Tensions between Qatar and Saudi Arabia feel like they're constantly simmering. Qatar is a tiny peninsula, Saudi Arabia is it's only land bridge. And Saudi Arabia, by comparison, is enormous. It doesn't take a genius to think that the Saudis might covet Qatar. Saudi Arabia is four times bigger than France, Qatar is smaller than Northern Ireland. And Qatar has 14% of all the world's natural gas: an already lucrative resource which has become vastly more expensive since Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

And as recently as five years ago Saudi Arabia planned...