SOONER or later, Sven-Göran Eriksson is going to have to decide whether he is coach of a national football team or tour manager for the Harlem Globetrotters. His job description and demeanour suggest the former, but in picking David Beckham for a match in South Africa, Eriksson might as well have his team run out to the strains of Sweet Georgia Brown.

Beckham in South Africa is showbusiness and nothing more. Once he received a yellow card against Turkey — and with it a ban from England’s next competitive game, against Slovakia — he became an irrelevance in Eriksson’s summer schedule. A hindrance, some would say, considering it might be better to play Kieron Dyer in two games on his favoured right side and boost his confidence before an important competitive international.

The trip to Durban is long and tiresome and the match itself a bridge-building relic of England’s failed bid to host the 2006 World Cup. If any player can justifiably avoid it at the end of a long season, he should. For some reason, though, Beckham will make the trip and as he flies off into the sunset, so does any hope Eriksson has of being taken seriously on the subject of international friendly games.

Those who will be involved against Slovakia next month, including Wayne Rooney, cannot duck out. They need to be with Eriksson’s squad as he builds towards a game that cannot be cursed by complacency after the good work at the Stadium of Light. As proven in Bratislava, the Slovaks are no walkover and a repeat of the slip-up against Macedonia in October would be disastrous to England’s European Championship hopes.

So more power to Eriksson in pushing hard for Rooney’s inclusion, but Beckham’s presence is nonsense, a marketing sham that reduces sportsmen to the level of performers. Beckham is our Meadowlark Lemon and if Eriksson utters a murmur of complaint about his team being too tired at the end of a season, he deserves to be reminded that he, and nobody else, extended the captain’s season by two weeks this year and threw in a couple of long-haul flights to boot.

The official explanation for Beckham’s selection is his meeting with Nelson Mandela; the most convenient excuse since Rooney succumbed to a knee ligament injury requiring precisely the amount of rest David Moyes, the Everton manager, has been prescribing all season.

Now there are those who claim Beckham couldn’t tell the difference between ANC and KFC, but I am not among them. I think it entirely possible that he is inspired by the thought of meeting one of the world’ s great men, even if I do not imagine the Beckhams entertaining each other by reading aloud passages from Long Walk To Freedom in matching Burberry pyjamas at the end of the day.

But the way Mandela has been wheeled out to serve and justify the FA motive of bums on seats and an Umbro outlet in every township is irksome. Let’s face it, the biggest surprise is that Beckham hasn’t run into Mandela before.

In the years when Wembley was still standing and regularly rented out for corporate shindigs, Ian Bishop, the former West Ham United and Manchester City midfield player, said that it was a source of professional embarrassment that he had never played beneath the Twin Towers. “Everybody gets to go there now,” he said. “Half of my street has been. I was talking to my milkman the other day — he played there on Saturday. I’m a footballer and I’m the only one I know that hasn’t.”

Meeting Mandela is going the same way. In modern life, if you are famous and in possession of a passport and a grin, chances are you will one day be snapped shaking hands with the Nobel Peace Prize-winner. Since retiring from active politics in 1999, all Mandela does is meet people.

Fair enough. Having been incarcerated for 27 years, Mandela probably feels that he has some catching up to do. Even so, he’s not exactly what you would call selective. I tried to find a list of his get-togethers on the internet and page one of several hundred listed George Bush, Kim Dae Jong, Ginger Spice, Morgan Freeman, Michael Jackson and 45,000 Canadian schoolchildren. Give him enough time, Becks, and he’ll get round to you eventually.

“Becks, it’s Nelson — fancy a meeting?” “Great, when do you want me?” “Well, it’ll have to be this afternoon, I’m afraid. I’ve got Tariq Aziz, Phil Tufnell and the cast of Big Brother III coming at 11.”

Beckham would not even be the first in the family to greet Mandela. In 1997, he linked up with the Spice Girls, whom he claimed were his heroes. On Robben Island in 1968, apparently, they listened to little else. Geri, particularly, was impressed.

“There’s a speech that Nelson Mandela did — I can’t remember when it was exactly,” she said, “in which he mentions never suppress yourself, never make yourself feel small — and that’s what Girl Power is all about. I think we’re all on the same level.”

Aren’t they just? Still, at least we know the meeting of Mandela and the England captain will not be the most fatuous in history. It will still be a needless gimmick, though. The England team should be bigger than the glorified opening of supermarkets and certainly England’s campaigning coach should be. There is no logical reason for David Beckham to travel to South Africa. Let the captain rest.

• E-mail Martin Samuel at aogy90@dial.pipex.com

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