Every Monday (well, most of them) we feature a favourite Alex cartoon selected by our readers.

With World Cup fever upon us, we thought we’d feature this cartoon, which appeared during the 2006 tournament. For once it’s not a joke about the England team being useless (a standard go-to theme of the Alex cartoon during World Cups), which is good, just in case all the usual rash optimism that this will be England’s year finally comes true. Statistically we have to win it again at some point soon, surely? After all, “sixty years of hurt” is starting to sound a bit tragic. If the Three Lions’ underachievement goes on for another couple of World Cups there will be English people who lived a respectable human life span and died without ever seeing their national team lift the trophy. And if we haven’t won it by the 2042 tournament, then football will have taken longer to come home than Halley’s Comet (which returns every 76 years).

Anyway, on to the cartoon. When we introduced the American boss Cyrus earlier in the year that this cartoon appeared, we thought he would be the perfect foil for Alex. But it turned out to be Clive who had the most fractious relationship with him. Many of their stand-offs were over Cyrus’s use of business jargon and Clive’s pedantic insistence on proper English being employed. It seemed to symbolise the last stand of Englishness against the relentless American machine, whose gradual takeover of the City of London had begun with the deregulation of markets in 1986. Clive didn’t fare much better in his personal battle with his American adversary, with Cyrus pinching his wife Bridget in 2015 and eventually firing him from Megabank in 2023.

Rereading this World Cup cartoon it proves to be a miracle of information compression. Although it has five frames (as opposed to our standard four) it’s really quite compact. There are two parallel narratives going on. Firstly, there is the conversation between Cyrus and Clive about football. This has to subtly and hopefully naturalistically convey quite a lot of information. We don’t like to presume any knowledge in the reader of our characters, so several things had to be flagged up: that Cyrus is American; that he likes to spout jargon; that Clive is a classic British snob who thinks that all things American are vulgar. Then the pun had to be set up and turned around. Even crafting the language so that “outside the box” segues fairly naturalistically into “thinking” required quite a bit of verbal jiggery-pokery. At the same time, Charles had constructed a mini Bayeux tapestry of action on the TV screen that follows the discussion: a footballer kicking the ball upfield; him being tripped; the referee blowing his whistle; the free kick being lined up.

Despite all this intricacy, the cartoon still comes in at a trim 102 words. That may be a lot for most cartoon strips, but it’s modest for Alex. About ten or twelve years ago we decided that our cartoons were getting a bit wordy (sometimes there was scarcely any room for Charles to draw the characters below ponderous speech bubbles) so we imposed a maximum limit of 120 words on ourselves, which we subsequently stuck to.

It’s been quite exhausting just reassessing the amount of work that went into constructing this cartoon, so it’s nice to be able to read it cold, twenty years on, and just enjoy it.

If you’ve got any suggestions for a favourite cartoon for future inclusion please email us. And do tell us if there’s a particular reason why it appealed to you.