Or in an air-conditioned stadium with the roof shut.Their real purpose, as almost everyone has long-since deduced, is to effectively break the game up into quarters, providing broadcasters the chance to beam an extra batch of commercials to the billions watching around the world.This latest, most gratuitous cash grab hurts most because it strikes at the heart of football's most endearing quality: its natural cadence and tempo, the uninterrupted rhythm that means a goal could come for either team at any moment.It is a fundamental difference between football and the other most popular ball sports around the world, but also may not be something you explicitly notice until it is taken away.So when you get to somewhere around the 22nd minute of a game just starting to find its groove, its tactical mechanisations beginning to emerge and the legs of its players now free and firing, and it suddenly stops, and instead you are watching an ad for a gambling company or a fast food chain or a deodorant, it feels like a cold bucket of water on the head.The breaks are tangibly impacting games, too There is no sport in which the disparity between the devotion of and care for its fans is greater than football.The hope must be that this specific rort, ad breaks disguised as drinks breaks, does not permeate the club leagues we obsess over or the other international tournaments we savour.US head coach Mauricio Pochettino has publicly expressed his distaste for the breaks, and his words may well carry more weight than those of the fans.But even if hydration breaks do become a relic of this World Cup, a very American quirk within a very American tournament, there will always be another scheme