The nights draw in, November is upon us, and it is time to gather round for another episode in our occasional series What We Talk About When We Talk About Football.

As anyone who has spent any time trying to avoid difficult conversations knows, football (and indeed all sport) is perhaps the greatest proxy subject ever created. It provides such helpful cover for a range of repressed upsets, inchoate resentments and subclinical neuroses that, as life goes on, many find it the subject which they feel safest and most comfortable talking about with, say, their parents. And, in due course, with their grown-up children. It is the circle of life, the Great Avoidance, and anyone who has used it to spare themselves another pointless argument about anything from Brexit to how some domestic issue was handled 30 years ago knows to what extent we are all in its most estimable debt.

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To Doha, then, and another vital intervention in the national debate from beIN sports legends Richard Keys and Andy Gray. When I say “national”, I refer of course to the nation these two complete anchors left behind in football’s cruellest instance of brain drain. Namely, Britain. Their contribution to the national debate in their new homeland is so relentlessly, obsequiously positive that Richard has long been known to this column as Qatar’s Lord Haw-Haw.

Even so, only the humourless could fail to admire the niche the pair have carved out for themselves in the Middle East. Richard likes to call their broadcast offering “the greatest football show on the planet”, a review which displays just the right level of confidence. The co-inventor of the Premier League would back himself against any earthling, but wisely keeps his powder dry as far as intergalactic banter goes. Either way, all televisual experts would agree the erstwhile Gloria Steinems of Sky Sports have created a new and distinct broadcast identity. And that identity is malevolently seething versions of Ron Manager.

As Fast Show viewers who loved him know, Ron’s nostalgia-rambles were an always entirely benign means of harking back to a yesteryear that never quite existed in the way one remembered it. With Richard and Andy, what you frequently get is a sense that when we are talking about how things used to be, football is merely a device. Sometimes, it even sounds like a dog whistle.

Consider their show from last week, which featured Sam Allardyce. News that Leicester had confirmed Claude Puel as their new manager had earlier prompted Richard to unleash a typically mild tweet, reading simply: “RIP British Coaching”. Now, these three wise men – all unimaginably enriched by the game of football – were providing the deep dive into the matter.

According to Allardyce (and my thanks to Adam Hurrey of Football Clichés for the clips): “You are almost deemed as second class because it’s your country today.” “We are highly educated, highly talented coaches with nowhere to go.” And: “The Premier League … is a foreign league in England now.” Mmmm. This is one of those discussions about football when you wonder if we are just discussing football.

The episode certainly serves as a reminder that the notion of being “left behind” is no respecter of wealth. It is a popular misconception – indeed, a populist one – that the left behind are economically disadvantaged. Instead, the likes of Richard Keys, Andy Gray and Sam Allardyce show us it can also be a state of mind, which can affect the monied elite of the emerald city of Doha just as much as the truly struggling. No matter how well you’ve done, you can be convinced that citizens of nowhere are coming over here and taking your jobs. Even though Keys and Gray are presumably taking Qatari jobs, and Allardyce was literally the £3m-a-year England manager until he sabotaged himself.

Thus the football managers’ dinner becomes another of those “no-go areas” in the UK you hear so much about, where natural-born Englishfolk do not tread. In recent times these zones have included the south-west London locale of Parsons Green (such a hotbed of fundamentalism that The White Horse pub, a stone’s throw from the tube station, has for decades now been nicknamed The Sloaney Pony) and the whole of Birmingham. Nigel Farage can frequently be found in off-primetime slots on Fox News attempting to peddle this fantasy, while Florida resident Richard Littlejohn has been doing something similar for years. Newer to the game, but making up for lost time, is dear old Abu Hopkins, down there in her rose-covered house in Devon, delivering remote assessments of a terrorist attack at the Natural History Museum which turned out to be a traffic accident. (I never understand why hysterically wet people like Katie and Nigel talk about the second world war so much – it merely draws attention to the fact that they’d have had to be interned during the conflict for the panic they’d have tried to spread.)

Yet just like the above, it must be noted that the likes of Keys and Gray and Allardyce – flown over to Qatar to spout this nonsense, if you please! – have found a way to profit personally from their elitist bitterness, all the while affecting to cry into their Leave-o-tinis about a vanished idyll. Theirs is a worldview that has had a great run of late, but which may soon be soberingly, painfully debunked.

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In fact, to watch the trio in action is to realise that you’re looking at the perfect subs’ bench should some horrendous and unforeseen negotiating injury befall the so-called Three Brexiteers in the cabinet. Sam Allardyce’s magical thinking as far as deals are concerned would make him the ideal candidate to go on for hopelessly overpromoted trade secretary Liam Fox, while Richard Keys’s unshakeable sense of his own analytic intellect suggests he could be brought on for Dexeu secretary David Davis without warm-up. As for Andy Gray, finally, he would be the perfect substitution for ragingly xenophiliac foreign secretary Boris Johnson. Both are natural diplomats, of course. But the real symmetry was surely suggested by that deathless newspaper expose of yore, when Andy was reported to have inquired of an unfortunate La Manga hotel concierge: “Eh senorio, where’s the fucking taxio?”