Hysterical Gunners were beaten fair and square
Very interesting, you say, but what has this got to do with football? Well, how about the fact that one of the stars of the movie is none other than Vinnie Jones? Still can’t see the footie connection, sez you, adding ‘boom boom’ just for some knockabout comic effect.
Which is fair enough. In truth, I only mention it because (a) it’s a relief to namecheck a film other than ‘The Da Vinci Code’ and (b) I happen to think that the production company are on to a loser.
Face it, no matter how wild and wooly they make their movie, they can’t possibly hope to compete with the carry on in London over the last 72 hours.
I refer, of course, to the outbreak of hysteria, centred on the Borough of Islington, which has trailed Arsenal’s failure to lift what we old fogies still like to think of as the European Cup. You know the drill by now. It’s all about how the heroic Gunners were laid low by a villainous foreign referee, with Sky News as the chief chorus-leaders in the traditional true Brit rendition of ‘We wuz robbed’.
Except, of course, for the small detail that they weren’t. Even allowing for the argument that the Samuel Eto’o goal was offside, Barcelona still had a perfectly good Giuly effort disallowed, a fact almost entirely overshadowed for our friends in the east by the sending off of Jens Lehmann which climaxed that incendiary sequence of events.
Nor can you blame referee Terje Hauge for missing the gilt-edged opportunities which came Thierry Henry’s way — and which, if taken, would surely have seen the cup brought back to North London — any more than you can credit the Norwegian with the pace and verve of Barca’s best play as they went about fashioning their dramatic comeback.
No, Barca won the thing fair and square — or at least as fair and square as any team can when their opponents have been reduced to ten men. In this respect, at least, we can all feel Arsenal’s pain.
The debate about the referee’s red card decision was already getting pretty heated in the Stade de France press room within minutes of the final whistle, and with the papers and TV happy to labour the point from a million angles since then, it shows little sign of running out of steam.
One viewpoint holds that the ref was left with no alternative but to send off Lehmann and award the free kick. Another — the thermonuclear option, if you like — is that he should have sent off the ‘keeper and also awarded the goal. And, in between, was the modest proposal, at first tentatively aired, that he could have awarded the goal and kept Lehmann on the pitch by giving him a yellow card.
Referee Hauge chose the first option, with predictably unhappy consequences for both teams, and as the post-match controversy gathered momentum, seemed to be backed in his decision by a UEFA spokesman who said that “technically, he was right.”
Maybe so, but in this case the devil was definitely in the detail, and Hauge would have been much wiser to take a deep breath and focus on the bigger picture. To his credit, he admitted as much on Thursday, confirming he was indeed permitted an alternative to the hasty course of action he chose.
“The ideal thing would have been to wait a few seconds,” he was quoted as saying. “If I’d done that, I could have given the goal and eventually given a yellow card. Of course, everyone wants a goal so this was a key decision.”
But even as he conceded some culpability, Hauge once again seemed to miss the real point. Failure to award a legitimate goal is certainly annoying enough — and all too prevalent in a sport in which the Luddites stubbornly insist on keeping video technology at bay — but much worse is the dismissal of a player who could be kept on the pitch. Everybody wants a goal, sure, but nobody wants a slanted playing field in any match, let alone for the greater part of one of the biggest nights of the world football calendar.
In theory, the concept of the professional foul is a worthy thing, with its sobering threat of the ultimate punishment for those who would resort to illegal measures to deny the triumph of honest effort and skill.
But in its application there has to be room for common-sense, the freedom for an official to weigh up all the options beyond the strictly technical nature of the crime and its mandatory punishment. So liberally are reds and yellows dispensed nowadays that they can even have the opposite effect to that for which they are intended, effectively tempting the cheats to go about their nefarious business in the belief that it only takes one suitably theatrical incident for the man in the middle to reach inside his pocket.
No-one wants a return to the laissez faire culture in which the kickers and cloggers left their stud marks all over the most sublime talents in football, yet long before FIFA began to seriously tackle foul play with a view to making football more entertaining, I seem to recall that the game somehow not only survived but thrived — for Ronaldinho, Henry and Zidane, read Pele, Best and Cruyff.
A clampdown on violent conduct is fine, but it’s hard to see who really benefits from the zealous enforcement of a zero tolerance policy if it means, as it did on Wednesday night in the Stade de France, that one of the most eagerly anticipated games of the year — and one which did serve up plenty of thrills as well as spills — ultimately leaves a sour aftertaste of shrill complaint and unanswerable questions about what might have been.
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