Football – and the winner is ……. money and the lust for fame.
Well, the England v Germany game was tragic of course. But it wasn’t because:
- the England team lost
- they played not only badly but moronically, with an idiotic rush upfield of the whole defence as if it were the last few minutes of the game, thus allowing the Germans to score more or less at will
- they repeated a few minutes later EXACTLY the same error as described above
- the Germans scored a goal straight from the kick-off, which BBC commentators said they had never before seen in an international match
- many of the players seemed “tired”, though this didn’t seem to trouble other players of the Premier League who were playing for other countries
- the English players mostly plodded about like sleepy elephants compared to the racing panthers of Germany (resisting the temptation to say ‘panzers’)
- the 5 million quid manager didn’t seem to have a clue; playing people out of position in a 4-4-2 formation that NOBODY else uses
- there were no specialist wingers; quite useful for getting behind the defence and lobbing in crosses, a strategy that seems as foreign to the manager as he is himself
- the same person was clearly unable to motivate and organise his players; as he speaks a different language this is not all that surprising – NO OTHER NATIONAL TEAM has a foreign manager, but we have to be different
- the manager – with three goals needed in 15 minutes brought on Emile Heskey as our ‘last hope’, no doubt a worthy person but with a very poor goal-scoring record
- the forward with the best goal-scoring record of all the English team (Crouch) hardly got a look-in
- the players were clearly disorganised and uninspired
- there seemed to be little real leadership on or off the field, with rumblings of discontent in the camp
- for all of the above the FA is paying this hopeless manager nearly £20,000 per working day of the year
No, all the above is or was silly – or perhaps a better word is “pathetic”. The real tragedy concerns the goal that wasn’t.
Of course, this was every bit as silly as the rest of it, FIFA looking completely ridiculous by its refusal to contemplate the use of technology to enhance “fairness” (a concept I am quite keen on but which seems a bit out of fashion generally). It seems that some of the vastly-paid and expensively-hotelled world-ranging FIFA executives think that technology would “reduce the drama”. I am seriously hoping that Argentina “do a Lampard” on Germany in the Friday game so that the idiocy of this policy will be rubbed in, especially to the (rather sadly) gloating Germans.
But we STILL haven’t got to the tragic bit, which is that the Germans missed a chance to be remembered for ever as the team that owned up to a goal. Neuer, the German goalkeeper, has said that when the ball rebounded from the bar and went in (as it clearly did) he at once reached behind, grabbed it and hoofed it upfield “so that the referee wouldn’t think it had gone in.” which of course (being blind) he didn’t.
In other words, Neuer KNEW it wasn’t a goal but didn’t say so. With this action he joined the serial cheats, divers, “get-an-opposing-player-sent-off” and Maradona “Hand-of-God” players who will do anything to win. These are people to whom the concept of sportsmanship, fairness, honesty and “doing the right stuff” are alien.
In the case of Maradona, the ability of humans to reach the peaks of irony was once again illustrated when before the World Cup started he made a plea for “fair play”. I am unaware that he has ever apologised for his own cheating, but of course it is much easier to urge other people to behave in a certain way than to do it yourself.
Anyway, I do not claim the English would have done any different; we’ll never know. Just as we’ll never know what the score of this match WOULD have been HAD the goal been given. What we DO know is that we’ll be thinking for the next forty years about how silly and unjust this was just as the Germans have been whinging on for the same length of time about 1966. It could and should have been so different. HAD the Germans gone at once to the ref and said: “It was a goal”, they would have been moral heroes for the rest of footballing history rather than remembered (by me at least) as just another bunch of cheats.
The tragedy of course is that a TREMENDOUS OPPORTUNITY was lost to make a pitch for honesty, fairness, sportsmanship and decency. What an example that would have been to everyone, especially our kids! And WHAT A CHANCE to dump for ever and ever the image of football as a cheats’ activity dominated by the false Gods of money and fame as well as the stereo-typed image that some idiotic Brits have of Germans as unfeeling Nazis.
No, their instinct was NOT to admit the goal and to benefit from an unfair error. Sad … for the next 40 years we’ll be talking about the unfairness rather than what a wonderful gesture they made.
Oh, and as for 1966, let’s lay this ghost to rest. There was NEVER ANY QUESTION that it wasn’t a goal. The referee and linesman on that day BOTH said it was a goal and it is obvious from the reaction of the players that it was a goal, even if in those times the cameras were not as sophisticated as today’s and cannot definitively PROVE it was a goal. I am afraid this 1966: “It wasn’t a goal – we wuz robbed.” stuff is a bit like the urban myth: “The German army was stabbed in the back by politicians.” that Hitler exploited after WWI.
Well, for me the World Cup has lost some sheen; it is all so silly, nationalistic and rife with unsportsmanship. All that one lives with (one is used it these days), but the missed opportunity to make a moral stand is one I deeply regret.
I hope it is clear that this has NOTHING TO DO with my being English. Had our boys done the same I would have been just as sad, even more so, as – perhaps stupidly – I would like to think we are made of better stuff. However, football is not cricket and even cricket is often not cricket today either.
By Chris Snuggs
Learning from Dogs 
That on the field the goal was not registered as a goal that is one thing, but that the game will now be recorded in the history books as a UK 1-4 loss to Germany, when all know it to be 2-4, that is harder to understand.
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Per – it won’t show 4-2 because that would officialize the mistake, and referees don’t make mistakes, except that they do.
In every other walk of like we try to correct mistakes, but football is the exception.
As for 4-2, had it been 2-2 at half time then the moronic English defence would not have rushed upfield in a desperate and silly effort to help get an equalizer, but would have played as it had been playing – not well, but tolerably, and – as is clear – well enough to have got the score to 2-2 at half time.
The whole thing was an utter farce; but what do you expect from Sepp Blabber? Now he’s threatening to ban France because their government is “meddling” in French national football! And North Korea’s tyrannical, gangster government doesn’t meddle? YOU COULDN’T MAKE IT UP.
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The international football federation has to learn that National Assemblies in democracies can inspect whatever they want. At a time of austerity, as the president of Nigeria may have pointed out, the debauchery of millionaires is no small potatoes.
Roger Cohen in the New York Times had a racist editorial motivated by the French team. Racist against both France and Islam. I am developing this in my next essay (8,000 + words). Here is an extract:
Even the New York Times allows his editorialists to feed racist hatred against the French. Roger Cohen wrote there an editorial claiming that “Just when you thought France could sink no further, it discovers improbable new depths to plumb thanks to … this imploding team where no middle ground binds the Muslim boys from the suburban projects and the clean-cut, middle-class French lad — Yoann Gourcuff of good Breton lineage?….It’s individualism rampant…It’s the distance between the tenacious French imaginary of the secular state integrating every immigrant and the facts of increasingly divided identity.
Removing Muslim veils won’t make France whole…Abidal is not alone in being a Muslim convert. Nicolas Anelka… also adopted Islam, as did Franck Ribéry on meeting his wife Wahiba (of North African descent). Romance in the projects happens with those who are there. France has become a land of Fatima Duponts without acknowledging it…something is working in America that’s dysfunctional in France. I know where I’d rather be an immigrant…Meanwhile, not wanting to look as rich as a French footballer, the president has cancelled the traditional Bastille Day garden party at the Elysée palace. It cost over $900,000 last year. Looks like a false economy to me. France should at least go down in style.”
[The French team went on strike because Anelka, who Mr. Cohen condemns as a Muslim convert, was fired. Here is the paradox for American neo-conservatives. American neo-conservatives always celebrate the mediocre Ayn Rand for writing the “Fountainhead”, a book where American millionaires go on strike, and the USA stop functioning. Now, of course, American millionaires never went on strike, and never will. But, in another French first, the entire world could admire the world’s first strike by multi millionaires, the soccer stars of the French football team. You would have thought that American neo-conservatives would have been on their knees, making incantations to their idols. Instead, they found in that multi millionaire strike another reason to vilipend France, showing that France is just a safe way to express their otherwise undirected racial hatred.]
Mr. Cohen, a practicing Jew (according to his published editorials) apparently resent the fact that some French convert to Islam, and that France is turning into Fatima Duponts without acknowledging it.
I know one of these converts, a good friend. His wife, born in Morocco as a Muslim, has been a close friend of mine for decades. She is a very pretty, blue eyed PhD biologist, turned manager. Her husband converted to Islam, because Islam forbids Muslim women to get married to non Muslims, under the penalty of death (in theory). Death being inconvenient, and wanting to see their family in Morocco, without the threat of such an inconvenience, he converted. The French being deeply secular, they don’t mind wearing a label they don’t care about.
Indeed they are both secular in the best French tradition, and do nothing Islamist (differently from me, who drinks no alcohol whatsoever). These pseudo conversions are a general phenomenon, hundreds of thousands of French have done it. They just mean that family peace is the true religion of France. Speaking of integration, polls show that even those French who are practicing Muslims celebrate Christmas, etc.
According to Cohen, the French soccer/football team loss proved that France was a bad, divided, racist society, whereas the American victory proved the USA was great in all ways, a racially harmonious society. Cohen forgot to mention the Watts riots (deadly and with nothing equivalent in France in the last 100 years). Cohen forgot that, in the last 30 years or so, only two French passport holders were accused of Muslim terrorism. One was killed by French police, the other is in American prison (he was implicated in 9/11).
Just last week six American Muslims were condemned for pro-“Muslim” terrorism (to life). The total Muslim origin population in France is even bigger than the American one (something which seems to upset Cohen). So one can compare. Many American Muslims hate the USA to the point of mass murdering Americans. Nothing of the sort seems on the horizon in France. All the recent anger of French Muslim in France was about the defeat of the Algerian football team (made mostly of dual citizenship French star players), resulting in the immolation of 15 of their neighbors’ cars by excited teenagers. The French repression apparatus tends to give a Gallic shrug to this sort of excitement. Much worse happens in the USA, where guns are used liberally, killing more than 30,000 Americans a year, and the total population in prison is more than 30 times greater than in France.
PA
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I think what the German goalkeeper did was wrong, but I’d imagine the David James would’ve done exactly the same thing in that situation.
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My point was the moral vacuity of this game, where blatant injustices which COULD be corrected are not.
This site is – as I understand it – about truth, honesty and justice.
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