They call it an epic, but The Odyssey was a harder watch than the woeful World Cup final

Of the weekend’s two would-be blockbusters – both Hollywood treatments of epic themes – I probably preferred the football, bad as it was.Each could have benefited from being an hour shorter. But Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey (2h 53m) had me furtively checking my watch as it wore on grimly towards its well-known conclusion. Whereas the World Cup final, being unscripted, at least had suspense on its side, even if the acting was at times terrible.I’ll give Nolan’s film this much: the wooden horse was good. For once, you could understand how the Trojans might have fallen for such a cheap trick. READ MOREI liked Odysseus’s dog too. His was a moving cameo that stole a march on the other contenders in what (according to the trailers shown beforehand) seems to be a summer of the dog in cinema.As for Elon Musk’s complaint that Nolan “desecrated” Homer by having a black actress play Helen, well, Rocket Man may have forgotten that the original screenplay was written in ancient Greek, and a form known as dactylic hexameter. If you can suspend incredulity at Matt Damon doing Odysseus in American English and Tom Holland’s Telemachus calling him and Anne Hathaway “Mom” and “Dad”, it shouldn’t require much additional effort to accommodate the brief (but well played) performance of Lupita Nyong’o.Had the World Cup final been given the full Hollywood treatment, meanwhile, Lionel Messi would have stopped eating the lotus blossoms with 20 minutes to go, whereafter the gradual recovery of his footballing memory would have culminated with him scoring a late winner.At that point, the Messi family’s ancient dog, mange-ridden but still lovable, would have limped on to the pitch and, after a last lick of the master’s face, died in his arms.But there are some liberties you can’t take with football, even in the United States. So Messi did not get to exercise his inner Damon. Instead, he and his teammates were wiped out by Spain’s remorseless defence and midfield, in which Scylla and Charybdis were again excellent.As for the World Cup’s Trojan horse – or Gianni Infantino, to give him his stage name – he had a relatively quiet final. But having already smuggled White House meddling and the quarterisation of games – with advertising breaks in the guise of “hydration” – into football, he rounded off the US invasion of the game’s Troy with a Superbowl-type half-time show.Happily for purists, the show was lamer than Odysseus’s dog. And as happened the last time the World Cup visited the States – 1994, when the final was a scoreless bore – the latest showpiece conspired to be most of the things the hosts hate about “soccer”.It might be too much to hope that that, having seen the inside of FIFA’s great city, Americans will now leave quietly again without wrecking the place, and take the horse with them. But there are grounds for hope that at the 2030 final in Madrid (or possibly Casablanca), we may at least be spared a game of four quarters and a 30-minute half-time.Although Messi and Argentina dominated most of the Odyssean analogies at the tournament just ended, the true inheritors of the Homeric tradition, potentially, continue to be England. After all, their quest to follow up the sole success of 1966 has been characterised in song as football coming home. But whereas it took Odysseus a mere 10 years to get home from Troy, it will now be at least 62 years, at the 2028 Euros, before England again bring a cup back from a major tournament.Again and again over the decades, their homecoming voyages have been beset by grotesque misadventure, almost always including the Cyclops (aka the English media): a one-eyed monster that first convinces them this, finally, will be their year, then eats them alive when it isn’t.If they ever do win a tournament again, the journey will have been a subject worthy of Homer and Nolan combined.There is even a ready-made dog cameo. Older readers may remember Pickles, the lovable mongrel who became a hero when finding the stolen Jules Rimet Trophy in March 1966.It had gone missing while on pre-tournament display in London, taken by ransom-seekers. But seven days later, wrapped in newspaper beside a parked car, it was tracked down by a curious Pickles, out walking with his owner. In a real sense, therefore, Pickles helped England win the World Cup; they might have had to settle for a replica trophy only for him.And he did become something of a film star as a result, appearing as himself in a comedy entitled The Spy with a Cold Nose later that year and as a guest on several TV shows including Blue Peter. Alas, his career in showbusiness was a short one. Pending a Nolan rewrite, it also lacked a Hollywood ending. In a twist even Homer might have hesitated to devise, poor Pickles died in 1967, aged five: strangled during the hot pursuit of a cat when his choke chain got caught in a tree.