True to form, Fifa was the last of sport’s pro-Russian fortresses to fall. Everybody else had renounced associations with Vladimir Putin – even those at the International Judo Federation, custodians of the Russian president’s favourite pastime. Putin is the author of a book of judo and arranges periodically to be pictured in his black belt as a reassertion of his virility. But the IJF disavowed him after he launched his barbarous invasion of Ukraine, suspending him as their honorary president and cancelling a planned event in Kazan. As for Fifa, we can go easy on any tributes to Gianni Infantino for kicking Russia out of the global game. For this was less the act of a leader responding to urgent moral imperatives than one of a man with nowhere left to turn.