Getting ready for the strangest World Cup since the last one. plus no Karim Benzema - The Warm-Up

To be perfectly honest with you, we didn't think we were actually going to get to this point. As soon as Sepp Blatter opened his envelope, which read QATAR, and then opened his mouth to say "Qatar?!", we thought: Nah. What was made in backrooms and on private jets will be unmade, quietly, in the same places, and we'll get another typical World Cup in one of the predictable places and we won't get any remote-controlled clouds.

We were right about that last bit. To the rest, not so much.

The actual opening ceremony is coming up later today - fireworks! dancing! a member of BTS! - but Gianni Infantino smashed open the metaphorical non-alcoholic champagne yesterday with his opening address. Doubtless you've seen the highlights, in which Infantino claimed, among other things, to feel like a firework, a dancer, and a member of BTS. Recalling his own childhood as a cursed redhead was a particularly delightful moment, as was his call for Europe to apologise for 3,000 years of global depredations. Football, you see, must not be politicised, except when it must.

Although, in Infantino's defence - not something we thought we'd be writing, now or ever - he is rather limited in his material. Most World Cups, even those held under deeply peculiar or outrageous circumstances, offer some kind of sporting narrative for the officials to centre their apologetics around. But today is the first game that Qatar will ever play at a World Cup, a fact that has been true of only previous two hosts: Uruguay in 1930, the first ever tournament, and Italy in 1934.

International football is used to talking around the elephant in the room. But here the space around the elephant is filled with another elephant, and another beyond that, and another, each squished up against the last, until at last they begin to pile up together into some kind of horrifying multi-pachyderm abomination, a heaving kaleidoscope of trunk and tail and stamping foot. A magic eye picture of elephant after elephant that, once you successfully defocus, brings another elephant looming forward out of abstract space. Infantino's speech can be understood, perhaps, as what happens when a man has nothing to talk about except all the things he absolutely cannot talk about.

And now comes the actual football. There is no greater distraction on earth than this tournament… and the strength of that statement is about to get stress tested like never before. As the tournament gets closer and the noise gets louder it's the organisational questions that are starting to predominate, from the last-minute decision to ban alcohol from the grounds, to the Fyre Festival jokes coming out of the fan camps. And the broader moral outrages are starting to coalesce into a more immediate worry: please, if we are going to do this, at least let everything work.

Every four years, we turn to the World Cup for something that isn't normal, that isn't usual, that is special; we hand over a month of our lives and we let football fill it up. It is tempting, therefore, to treat each one as an isolated occurrence. But here it is important that we recognise continuity: Qatar 2022 takes its place in the lineage of World Cups, just as the moral questions around the tournament, from the path to victory in the bidding process to the deaths of migrant workers, are of a piece with those that football has always grappled with - or tried its best to ignore.

Perhaps this is a stranger tournament than usual. But it is also a logical point for the business of football administration to have reached, and perhaps that is the most important thing to remember as it unfolds, as we watch or not. We got here step by step, moment by moment; this is where FIFA has taken itself, and us. It is tempting to treat this tournament as an aberration; it is important that we don't. Elephants, even metaphorical ones, don't just appear in a room by magic. They are led in through opened doors.

And when it comes to Qatar 2022, the biggest elephant of the lot is the realisation that this, in the overlapping worlds of football administration, high politics and big money, all makes perfect sense. Football has not been hijacked, it did this to itself. And the big question for a month's time is: what on earth happens next.

Until then, some football. And here's an extremely not-fun fun fact, given the circumstances: the last time the holder of the Ballon d'Or didn't play at a World Cup was in 1978, when Allan Simonsen and Denmark failed to get out of qualifying.

Perhaps it was always a bit of a long shot. Karim Benzema, the current holder of the Golden Balloon, last started (and last scored) for Real Madrid on October 19, in a 3-0 win over Elche. He missed the following game with muscle fatigue, and since then - with the exception of half an hour against Celtic - he's been on a cautious recovery program. Yesterday was his first time training with the full France squad, and yesterday he picked up a thigh injury and will miss the tournament.

Ask yourself 'is this a blow to France's hopes?', and you'll immediately end up answering yourself: ' well of course it is, you idiot'. Benzema is brilliant; Benzema is the holder of the Ballon d'Or; Benzema is so good, in fact, that Didier Deschamps reversed his exile and brought him back in to a squad that had just won the World Cup. He did so in search of something that Benzema could offer, a theoretically mouthwatering combination with Kylian Mbappé, and now that's gone.

But Olivier Giroud is still there. As Grace Robertson noted for this very site in the build-up to Euro 2020, it's not controversial to say that Benzema is better than Giroud, but France have to play differently with each. At the last World Cup, with Giroud up top, France ended up playing a remorselessly solid and occasionally quite boring style of football - but it worked. Get it to Giroud. He'll get it to either Mbappé or Griezmann. Profit.

It is a sad truth of tournament football that defensive solidity with a sprinkling of genius is usually more effective than systemic attacking brilliance with a soft underbelly. We note here that France exited Euro 2020 after conceding twice late on to Switzerland. Benzema's absence will certainly make France less fun and will also make them worse, in an abstract sense, but it doesn't mean that they won't find a solution. And Deschamps now has the excuse he needs to go back to his miserable happy place.

Remains to be seen if it works without Paul Pogba, of course. But if history tells us anything, it's that France don't win the World Cup when their main striker is scoring goals. Just Fontaine scored 13 in 1958, as France finished third. Stéphane Guivarc'h and Giroud both have winners' medals, despite leaving 1998 and 2018 without a single goal between them. You can't argue with precedent.

Non-league football continues in England, and non-league football continues undefeated. Last night Warrington Town's goalkeeper was dismissed in mysterious circumstances …

… but soon, all became clear.

Opening games set the tone. This is one of those things that the Warm-Up decided as young age, and we haven't dared work out if it's actually true or not. But the opening game of 2006 definitely set up what came afterwards, at least as far as hosts Germany went. Couldn't defend, didn't care.

Over to the Guardian today, where Philippe Auclair is retelling the story of perhaps the greatest World Cup opener: that time Senegal embarrassed France, not just the defending champions but their former imperial overlords.

"France were the holders. France, so long in search of a centre-forward, could call upon the top goalscorers in the English, French and Italian leagues: Thierry Henry, Djibril Cissé and David Trézéguet. France were the favourites and had shown – in Euro 2000 – they could live with that tag … France had learned to be winners; but those winners were exhausted. Patrick Vieira had played 61 games before landing in South Korea. The results of the physical tests run in early May at the altitude performance centre of Tignes in the French Alps were catastrophic. As Youri Djorkaeff put it: 'We were carbonised.'"

They were also, you'll be shocked to hear, not a particularly happy camp, with Henry vocally challenging the decision to shunt him out onto the left. Over on the Senegal side, things were a great deal more relaxed. Here's the last words of coach Bruno Metsu before the game, as recalled by El-Hadji Diouf: "What can I possibly say to you today? We’ve been together for a long time now. I know you all so well. You’re a crazy bunch. I know that tonight, after the match is finished, people will be talking about you right across the world. Up you get, and show me what you’re capable of."

(In the interests of full disclosure, this is a chapter from a book that your correspondent also appears in. We wrote about West Germany 3-2 Hungary from 1954, and we had enormous fun doing so. Have a look. You'll like it.)

For those of you watching, there's Qatar vs. Ecuador. But if you're not, for whatever reason, then there's a whole load of WSL, and the Republic of Ireland are playing a friendly against Malta. Timing, lads.