The 20th-century English socialist’s most quotable aphorisms, however penetrating when first coined, have become devalued through overuse.

Eric Arthur Blair was, moreover, no great sports aficionado, describing school football as “the daily nightmare”, even if he conducted “a sort of hopeless love affair” with cricket up to the age of 18.

While his futuristic visions of, say, the surveillance society were freakishly far-sighted, it should perhaps come as little surprise if his record on sport was patchier.

Rules, though, as they say are made for breaking.

I found it impossible at the weekend, while absorbing wearily familiar accounts of outbreaks of hooligan violence at the European Football Championships in France, not to reflect on Orwell’s definition of serious sport as “war minus the shooting” - not least because it was inspired by an Anglo-Russian football event in the shape of Dinamo Moscow’s tour of Britain some seven decades ago.

That particular phrase, however resonant, is not quite right - “War minus the shooting - and the consequences” would be more prosaic, but also more accurate: Gareth Southgate’s penalty miss at Euro 96 did not open the way for Helmut Kohl to trundle into 10 Downing Street.

But while I disagree fundamentally with Orwell’s apparent conviction that sport is incapable of bringing nations together, there are other observations in his piece, The Sporting Spirit, that are harder to find fault with, even at 70 years’ distance.

These two sentences, for example, are absolutely spot on:

“At the international level sport is frankly mimic warfare. But the significant thing is not the behaviour of the players but the attitude of the spectators: and, behind the spectators, of the nations who work themselves into furies over these absurd contests, and seriously believe - at any rate for short periods - that running, jumping and kicking a ball are tests of national virtue.”

This passage is not too wide of the mark either:

“The whole thing is bound up with the rise of nationalism - that is, with the lunatic modern habit of identifying oneself with large power units and seeing everything in terms of competitive prestige.”

And while I disagree with the blanket assertion (updating named adversaries as necessary) that, “If you wanted to add to the vast fund of ill-will existing in the world at this moment, you could hardly do it better than by a series of football matches between Jews and Arabs, Germans and Czechs, Indians and British, Russians and Poles, and Italians and Jugoslavs, each match to be watched by a mixed audience of 100,000 spectators”, Orwell’s verdict on the Dinamo tour seems strikingly apposite for England’s drawn match with Russia in Marseille on Saturday - “If such a visit as this had any effect at all on Anglo-Soviet relations, it could only be to make them slightly worse than before”.

Orwell was writing as the western world was emerging cowering from the shadow of war.

His was also an era in which countries were far more separate than they are today.

His assertion in The Lion and the Unicorn that, “When you come back to England from any foreign country, you have immediately the sensation of breathing a different air” now reads as quaintly as you would expect a sentence written in the 1940s to read.

Particularly when he goes on, “The beer is bitterer; the coins are heavier; the grass is greener; the advertisements are more blatant.

“The crowds in the big towns, with their mild knobby faces, their bad teeth and gentle manners, are different…”

If there is a surprise about his observations on sport, it is not that some of them are now off-beam, but that so many of them retain relevance.

To be brutally honest, it is actually insufferably pedantic of me to pick holes in that overused “war minus the shooting” maxim.

Though it may not convey the whole story, it is, in a way, the whole point.

As underlined so hideously in Orlando on Sunday, and every day in Syria, war minus the shooting is infinitely better than the alternative.

If the premeditated thuggery on display in Marseille is the worst thing French authorities are confronted with during Euro 2016, I imagine they will be content enough.

This, after all, is a country that has recently suffered two shockingly gruesome terrorist attacks, the second of which began in the vicinity of the national football stadium. 

Making as sure as humanly possible that the present tournament is not subjected to a similarly grisly assault just has to be the security services’ first and last priority.

This is mainly of course for the sake of the men, women and children currently flocking to the stadia and fan-zones and, by extension, of our still relatively carefree West European way of life, though it has to be said that another unprevented attack would also deal a body blow to Paris’s 2024 Olympic and Paralympic bid.

Orwell’s life spanned two World Wars, but the modern-day suicide bomber was not, as far as I know, a phenomenon he was required to grapple with.

I can’t help thinking that his take on competitive sport - and, who knows, perhaps on Big Brother and his ilk as well – might have been a shade more indulgent had he been alive today.

Alan Hubbard's blog will appear tomorrow