First, as dawn broke, there was the beauty, the wonder, the splendour, the almost Shakespearean drama of the England versus Colombia match from the World Cup. It ended with a penalty shoot-out.

How Shakespeare, writing today, would love and would surely adapt the penalty shoot-out, incorporating it into his most tragic plays. I think he would even have ended his Hamlet not with the present unsatisfying flurry of bloody woundings and poisonings but instead with Prince Hamlet’s team clashing with the team of Hamlet’s vile uncle Claudius (a moron and a pig, just the sort of man Sarah Hanson-Young has been seething about) in a match decided on life-and-death penalty kicks.

Then, hard on the heels of this World Cup spine-tingler there was the promised ABC Radio National Breakfast interview with the polarising Senator David Leyonhjelm. With the radio on in the background I could hear Breakfast host Hamish Macdonald promising the interview even as, in the foreground, the England versus Colombia penalty shoot-out unfolded on the almost obscenely big screen of my new TV.

The ABC’s Macdonald is a famously probing, pugnacious interviewer and the Macdonald vs Leyonhjelm match promised some of the same drama as the Colombia versus England clash. Would the hitherto defiantly unapologetic Leyonhjelm apologise at last under Macdonald’s withering interrogation? Would England beat Colombia and tango through to the quarter-finals of this wondrous World Cup, to play already-qualified Sweden? Then, should Sweden beat them, might we see a sort of replay of the all-time great 1992 UK tabloid screaming headline, Swedes 2 Turnips 1?

Another aspect of the drama-followed-by-a-drama of Wednesday morning was the way in which, disturbingly, it juxtaposed the sacred (soccer, the Beautiful Game, the quasi-religious delight of hundreds of millions of our appreciative species) with the profane.

The Leyonhjelm/Hanson-Young imbroglio, the media’s preoccupation with it and the worst of the trolling it is stoking, is sordid and profane. The fact that I cannot stop following the Leyonhjelm/Hanson-Young news and issues fills me with shame.

One desperately wants to give up the vile habit of following the pornography of Australian politics so as to be able to concentrate on Higher Things (the plays of Shakespeare, the music of Mozart, the poetry of Wordsworth, the football being played at the World Cup). But Beelzebub entices us with politics, and the flesh is weak.

But God does have some victories in his tug-of-war for our souls with Beelzebub, and giving our species an appreciation of soccer-football is one of His victories.

Football is called the World Game because it is played, watched and adored by hundreds of millions of us the world o’er. This playing, this love of the game, is so universal that the Martians, studying us, must imagine (correctly) that it is a defining characteristic of our species.

The Martians will be noticing, as all well-travelled humans have, that the urchins of the world are all playing football whenever they have a ball or something ball-like to play with and two jackets, sticks, rocks, paper bags, stolen turnips, sheep skulls or Coca-Cola cans to use for goal posts.

Did we, football-mad urchins, already subconsciously feel in our juvenile bones as we played, what we know today? Did we know, as urchins kicking a ball around (often, for we were Third World urchins in poor post-war England, it was a precious, balding, dog-mangled tennis ball) that we were engaging in an art form, dancing in a great ballet? How bewitchingly balletic the aforementioned England versus Colombia match, like something staged by the Bolshoi on a giant 100m by 50m meadow-stage!

One of our joys as working-class urchins was to go and play football (until chased off by wild-eyed Margaret Thatchers) on the gorgeous hockey fields of the local snob school (let us call it St Brunnhilde’s) for the daughters of gentlefolk. Today I recognise, in the sumptuousness of St Brunnhilde’s upper-class facilities (“Jolly hockeysticks, Angela!”) while us urchins had nothing but turnips and tennis balls, the kind of injustice that has made me a lifelong socialist.

Thoughts of the art form of football and of the coming England vs Sweden ballet clash feel like meditations on the sublime. By contrast thoughts about the Leyonhjelm-Hanson-Young clash feel like preoccupations with slime. Slimy thoughts on the latter include wonder that Senator Leyonhjelm fancies himself the champion, the knight in shining armour, of my maligned sex.

He is duelling with Senator Hanson-Young for her “misandry”. Perhaps it is ungrateful of me but I don’t require him to do this. It’s not only that he’s awful but also that it’s surely not the case that real men feel such solidarity with their sex. Are we, all blokes, some kind of bonded team? Are we all for one and one for all, like an expanded version (expanded to millions) of the tight-knit Three Musketeers, Athos, Porthos and Aramis?

If Sarah Hanson-Young seethes that Aramis sometimes behaves “like a moron and a pig” then the other two of us (for we are thinking men) will surely judge things on their merits. We may very well agree that the woman is right, that, yes, Aramis’ behaviour towards women is a disgrace and that he, like Senator Leyonhjelm, should apologise and mend his piggish ways.