Dalrymple finds condescension in an attempt to avoid the appearance of snobbery:

It was on a Saturday afternoon that I spoke, and the speaker after me was a professor at Oxford…[H]e began his lecture by announcing the football results, which he claimed to be relieved to know before he started. He claimed also to be very pleased that ‘we’ – the team he claimed to support – had won.

…

I have nothing against football as such…it is the absurd and slightly intimidating emphasis placed on it by politicians, chief executives of companies and increasingly by academics that I find sinister.