Did England goalkeeper Robert Green have oil on his gloves when he let USA’s Clint Dempsey’s offering from 25 yards slip past him on Saturday?

Things have got personal between the UK and the USA, and with the BP oil crisis nearing the end of its 56th day, emotions on both sides of the Atlantic are running high.

The British tabloids have taken Obama’s repeated use of BP’s old name, British Petroleum, as a personal slur against the British. “Stop being nasty to BP,” demanded the Daily Mail’s Melanie Phillips, before concluding with the kind of verbose sulkiness that teenage girls usually reserve for their fathers: “He turned on BP in a cynical attempt to deflect public anger from his own lacklustre performance, for which purpose it was useful to bash the British.”

Major of London, Boris Johnson, joined in the fray to denounce Obama’s “anti-British rhetoric”, saying that it was “a matter of national concern if a great British company is being continually beaten up on the airwaves”.

And, The Mirror jumped on the chance to denounce Obama’s anti-Britishness by claiming to have the exclusive information that blow out preventer on the Deepwater Horizon, whose failure lead to this whole mess, was manufactured by an American company, Cameron International: Barack Obama’s “anti-British” attack on BP backfires, read the headline.

I have to add that I’m thankful that Obama didn’t try to call a parallel between the blow out manufacturer’s name and Britain’s new Prime Minister as another reason why the UK were to blame for the spill because I’m pretty sure that the quick-witted investigative journalists at The Mirror would have called them out on that one too.

Obama’s anti-British qualifications, according to the popular voices of the British tabloid media, rest on his repeated use of BP’s old name, British Petroleum. But when I started looking for instances when Obama has referred to BP by anything other than it’s two letter initials I drew a blank. As Giles Whittell pointed out in a comment piece in The Times the other day, Obama has “not repeatedly, not pointedly, not — as far as anyone who has bothered to search the record can tell — at all” called BP British Petroleum, “Robert Gibbs, his spokesman, has used the words instead of the initials, but he is a different person.”

And, to have tried to accuse America of being anti-British for what it’s press secretary said might have pushed even Melanie Phillips to admit that the argument only worked when yelled from the mouth of a teenage girl, quickly followed by a perfectly inflected “I hate you” and a well timed slam of the door.

The fact is that both the UK and the USA are allowed to be feeling a little bit fraught over the BP disaster. The UK have watched share price of their biggest corporation plummet. Added to that is concern over pensions, which are heavily invested in the oil company.

On the other side of the pond, the US is looking at an environmental and financial catastrophe in the Gulf, and Obama is desperately trying to keep hold of the reigns of his presidency. Add to that the detail that most of the fallout from this disaster is playing out in the ‘Katrina state’, makes it an absolute requirement that Obama is seen to act where Bush dragged his feet. But what can the President do beyond cheering on the clean-up crews and blaming BP?

But no matter how you look at the crisis caused by the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon 56 days ago, this is not a fight between the UK and the USA. It never has been, and the only circumstance under which such a fight could occur is if Cameron now demands Obama to hand over the beer they bet on the UK-USA World Cup match, because, come on no one can argue against it, Dempsey’s goal was a fluke.