The blame game fails to find a winner
Yep, our old friend Martin Hansson rolled back the months with a double-whammy on Wednesday night, first telling George Hamilton on a flight to Portugal that he’d initially thought William Gallas and not Thierry Henry had handled the ball in Paris, and then making another bid for infamy with his handling, if you’ll pardon the pun, of Porto’s Champions’ League game against Arsenal.
Where to begin? Back in Paris, I’m afraid. Almost entirely forgotten now is that, on that seismic night in the Stade de France, Hansson was having an exceptionally good game right up to the moment when the roof fell in for officialdom and for Ireland’s World Cup hopes. Dashing the theory that he might have felt under pressure to ensure the top seeds progressed, he even had the gumption to deny Nicolas Anelka a solid penalty shout after the striker had tangled with Shay Given, an incident which provided the ref with the perfect opportunity to load the dice in favour of les Bleus. That he chose not to also undermines the notion that he then deliberately turned a blind eye to the most high-profile case of double handball in football history.
