I am grateful to all the many football pundits and even politicians who have
declared that France’s qualification for the World Cup finals after a
disputed goal “casts doubt on the integrity of the beautiful game”. In these
recessionary times we need all the laughter we can get; and what could be
more comical than this concerted pretence that professional football has for
years been anything other than an inordinately well funded assembly of
inveterate whingers and cheats?
It’s the whingeing I find especially emetic. Every leading club and national
team practises the art of deceiving the referee to gain an illicit
advantage; but when the official is conned, the team that loses out affects
the affronted outrage of an injured innocent. In the case of Thierry Henry’s
handling of the ball, which led to the French scoring a decisive goal in
their World Cup eliminator against the Republic of Ireland, an entire nation
has taken on the role of unjustly oppressed victim — something the Irish do
well, having had several centuries of practice.
The Irish should be especially dismayed by the way the British press has
lavished such sympathy on them for their misfortune in the Stade de France,
as it merely demonstrates that we still condescendingly feel Ireland is an
extension of the United Kingdom.
There were a few voices of reason, not from the sports writers and
politicians, who were all shamelessly indulging the epic Irish whinge, but
from the viewers at home who pointed out that the Irish striker Robbie Keane
had more than once in the same game attempted to control the ball with his
hand and was prevented from taking unfair advantage only because the referee
happened to notice. The difference was that Henry cheated more skilfully:
his controlling hand was not visible to the officials. Indeed, after the
game the Irish player Damien Duff blurted out: “If it was me or Robbie at
the other end, we would have tried it. You just expect the referee or
linesman to see it.”
So there you have the real story. It’s not their fellow cheats the footballers
despise, but the referees for not spotting every one of their dishonest
tricks. The football commentators take the same contemptible line. This is
clear from the BBC’s website, where you can still hear Radio 5’s commentator
entirely missing that a handball had occurred in the build-up to the goal,
but then, having seen the reverse-angle slow-motion film, scream: “It’s
unbelievable that that was not seen!” With fans duly inflamed by such inane
commentary, the Swedish referee, Martin Hansson, performed the ritual
traditional in such circumstances: he was reported to be “in hiding”.
On the field, of course, the Irish players had remonstrated lengthily with
Hansson after he had awarded the goal against them. This is one of the most
extraordinary things about professional footballers. In all their years of
playing the game, they will never have witnessed a referee cancelling a goal
because of players’ protestations. In fact, they will never have seen a
referee going back on any decision under such pressure. Yet still they will
bawl at officials in an attempt to get them to reverse some decision or
other. Is this because they are all fantastically stupid and therefore
unable to learn from experience? Or is it just that they get a kind of
animal pleasure out of intimidating the referees?
To be fair to the players, many of whom are teenagers who would struggle to
write their own name on their £50,000-a-week contracts, they are under the
influence of managers who are no better, even with the benefit of maturity.
One reason why many years ago I stopped watching the BBC’s Match of the Day
is that I was no longer able to bear watching the managers of the losing
teams whinge about the referees’ decisions, as if some cosmic injustice had
been perpetrated.
Rugby games contain a fair amount of controversy over the decisions of
officials, as do cricket matches. Penalties in the former are often given
erroneously, but I have never yet seen a rugby club manager whinge about it
on camera after the game is over. Similarly, international cricket players
are often given out leg before wicket in error, but you will never hear the
losing captain make an issue of it in a post-match interview. Partly that is
down to what is still, in cricket, called “the spirit of the game”; partly
it is because captains and players know that over the length of a season the
good and bad luck tends to even out and thus is shared indiscriminately. Why
is it that footballers and their managers, alone among sportsmen, seem
unable to grasp this simple point? It does not require a degree-level
understanding of probability theory to appreciate it, after all.
This nauseating inability to affect even a modicum of self-restraint and
dignity seems peculiar to football, among our national sports. When rugby
players or cricketers are struck sickening blows, they do their best to
appear unaffected, though they may be in excruciating pain; football players
will howl and writhe, even when they have not suffered more than a graze. It
is just so unmanly.
Some argue it is the vast amount of money at stake in professional football
that has given rise to such undesirable conduct — as if it were all Sky’s
fault for bidding so much for Premier League broadcasting rights. The notion
of money as a uniquely corrupting force is about the only aspect of
conventional Christian thought still generally acceptable in 21st-century
Britain; but here it seems wide of the mark. Those who take part in purely
amateur football tell me referees are abused in their matches every bit as
much as they are in the professional game.
Nor is there anything especially new in the debased standards of top-level
football. In 1977 our greatest living dramatist, Tom Stoppard, wrote a play
for television, Professional Foul. It concerns an academic, Professor
Anderson, who travels to Prague to deliver a lecture on “Ethical fact in
ethical fiction”; but his true motive is to see England play Czechoslovakia
(as it then was) at football. In a wonderful scene characteristic of
Stoppard’s love of paradoxical encounters, an inebriated philosopher,
McKendrick, accosts a sober England team member, Broadbent, in the hotel
where both ethicists and footballers are staying — and goads him about
footballing morality.
McKendrick begins by observing that whenever the ball goes out of play after a
clash between two players, both of them invariably claim to be innocent of
the last touch, even though it is always obvious to both of them who played
the ball last. “So what I want to know is — why is it that on Match of the
Day, every time the bloody ball goes into touch, both players claim the
throw-in for their own side? I merely ask for information. Is it that they
are very, very stupid, or is it because a dishonest advantage is as welcome
as an honest one?”
It’s a question that is even more worth asking today than when Stoppard’s
character raised it more than 30 years ago. In the play McKendrick
concludes: “The reason footballers are yobs may be nothing to do with class,
or with financial greed, or even with being footballers. It may be simply
that football attracts a certain kind of person, namely yobs . . .” and at
this point the philosopher’s drunken diatribe is abruptly ended when
Broadbent knocks him out with a mighty punch. You might say that both
characters made their point in their own way.
The main difference between the present day and when Stoppard wrote
Professional Foul is that footballers and their degraded game have become
even more celebrated in the vicarious life of the nation. Does anyone know
why it is still called “the beautiful game”? That has to be the biggest joke
of all.
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