You may have noticed that one of your favourite sports blogs to have stills from Ripping Yarns at the top of the page has been rather tumbleweed-friendly of late. What can I say? You get what you pay for! But, heh heh, seriously, heh heh heh, no, really, if I can be serious for a moment, heh heh — I do make myself howl sometimes, Jemima, I really do! — other stuff has been afoot, preventing me from devoting my fullest attention to this here space. The nurse has assured me that, assuming the medication has no nasty side effects, normal service will shortly resume.
While you await delivery of part one of my epic series Anders Limpar: The player Cantona wished he could have been, here's a friendly reminder: if somehow you are bored, irritated or offended by the attention Barcelona receive, there's always the new series of The X Factor. Dermot O'Leary is totally non-threatening, I promise.
Also, for no good reason other than that there's always a good reason:
International sporting successes are rare for Ireland, so let's make the most of it. Congratulations to Philip Deignan (I'm sure he reads this blog) for his win in stage 18 in the Vuelta a España. It's the first Grand Tour stage win for an Irish cyclist since Stephen Roche in the 1992 Tour de France, apparently, and it takes Deignan up to ninth in the general classification. With only three stages to go!
Time now to introduce a new feature here at Sport Is A TV Show, in which we provide a curious sportistic factoidlet and ask you, dear reader, "did you know" it. We're calling it "Were You Utterly Cognizant of the Fact...?"
So, "were you utterly cognizant of the fact" that after he made that jump in the first round of the 1968 Olympic final, Bob Beamon attempted a second one? (It registered 8.04m.)
Two things. Firstly: after breaking the world record by almost two feet, after one of the greatest athletic feats in the history of the species, he somehow felt that he could emulate it. Which is adorable. Secondly: he was somehow able to pull himself together well enough to jump over eight metres: not earth-shattering, but not exactly bad considering how he obviously felt after that jump.
Then again, look at this. Jonathan Edwards broke (his own) world triple jump best with his first jump in the 1995 World Championship final. He broke it by 18cm — not quite a Beamonesque margin, but still extraordinary. Like Beamon, he took a second leap and...
By the way, if ever you wanted to see a man fly (with the assistance of a strong tailwind), watch this.
(Okay, maybe the fact that the camera was closer to the runway than it usually is makes it look cooler than it actually was. But how cool it actually was was way, way, way cool to begin with. So, y'know.)
Such has been the spate of untimely deaths in boxing lately that one is naturally inclined to search for some correlation, for some inherent rottenness that underpins all this. But whether this is so or it's mere statistical happenstance, what is fundamentally true is that each of these deaths is its own discrete tragedy. And when, as with Darren Sutherland, it comes through suicide, there is an ultimate inscrutability to it, an unresolvable enigma.
Sutherland charmed the nation at last year's Olympic Games. Bringing home a medal will in itself do that in a country where such an achievement is rare. (Sutherland was one of three Irish boxers to win medals in Beijing, a remarkable haul.) But more than that, his charisma was obvious: a modest charisma, at once embodying confidence and courtesy — there was no side to him — and all delivered in a beguilingly unique accent, the product of an upbringing divided between St. Vincent and Meath. And it appears that Sutherland was one of those figures whose public image tallied with the private reality, as the many generous tributes to him today have demonstrated.
One such tribute came from James DeGale. It was DeGale who beat Sutherland in the middleweight semi-finals last year. Both fighters turned professional after the Games, and the pair were destined, so we thought, to renew their rivalry in a pro ring — maybe even in a title fight. Said DeGale: "I just do not know what to say except that he was a brilliant fighter, in fact an excellent fighter, and he was a gentleman outside the ring as well. He had an Olympic bronze medal and his whole life to look forward to. He had a great future and my heart goes out to everyone who knew him."
From the Father Ted episode "A Christmassy Ted", first broadcast December 1996.
TED: Well. (Pause.) Well, well, well ... (He looks at the audience.) I see a lot of familiar faces here today. Some more welcome than others. It looks as though I've had the last laugh on a lot of people who didn't really think I had it in me to be a brilliant priest. But what I would say to those people is: look at me now...
Fade out. Fade back.
TED: ... but I eventually escaped from his headlock. And where are you now, Father Eamonn Hunter? Working with some pygmies in the South Seas. And where am I? Accepting a Golden Cleric Award for being a top priest...
Fade out. Fade back. We notice there's less people in the seats. Ted natters away, oblivious.
TED: ... 'Yes, of course', he thought. 'It'd be a great idea to pour water on this young novice's mattress'. But of course, thirty years later, the smile has been very much wiped off Father Barry Kiernan's face...
Fade out. Fade back. There are only a few priests left.
TED: ... and now we move on to 'Liars'. Ahem. Father Peter Sorton. Father Desmond Cairns...
City? Football? Vot iz zis "football" of vich you are being speaking of?
Moving on, here's something really good. This is Black Power Salute, a documentary aired by the BBC before last year's Olympic Games. It tells the story of Tommie Smith* and John Carlos' protest on the rostrum at the 1968 Games and the intrigue surrounding it. Part one is above. The YouTube playlist is here. It's well worth an hour of your time.
* Something that gets understandably lost in all this, but which I think is still worth noting, is that Smith won the 200m in a time of 19.83s. Yes, it was at altitude, but that is seriously, historically, good.
A question: if you use a sport blog to post a post that has nothing to do with sport, which bath empties first? No conferring, now.
Some of you doubtless spotted that the title of the most-recent-but-one post here was purloined from the Beatles song 'You Never Give Me Your Money'. Those of you who didn't spot it, of course, will not have spotted it. One of the remarkable things about the Beatles is that even though so many of their songs have lodged themselves into the public consciousness, there still lurk other tracks of equal splendour which reveal themselves only with the application of a little bit of nerdery, or "listening to the albums", as it is also known. 'Hey Bulldog' is one. 'Good Morning Good Morning' blows most of the rest of Sgt. Pepper away. (Just avoid the Dave Matthews versions of the latter two songs. Trust me on this.) And 'You Never Give Me Your Money' might just be the best number on Abbey Road. Like 'Complete Control' by the Clash, it represents the death of an ideal: the end of the sixties, the commercialisation of the punk spirit. Or they're both whines about some business dealings gone awry. Whatever. The point is they're good, okay?
Speaking of Beatles nerdery, this might be the finest example I've seen:
Finally, in case you were wondering what Sir William (now Lord) Rees-Mogg's comedy sketch 'Bitchmother, Come Light My Bottom' is like, voici:
I shall now wait and see how long it takes someone to find Sport Is A TV Show by using "bitchmother" as a keyword. Soupy twist.
Stray thoughts for a Sunday evening on Ireland, England, diving, Bendtner, Portugal, Argentina and underdogs. Comes with FREE LINKS!
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For those of you worldwide who are just dying to know, Cyprus-Ireland was fugly. You know how people were not so long ago predicting that the next great tactical trend would be to play no forwards? Ireland are trying to qualify for the World Cup without any central midfielders. They say Keith Andrews and Glen Whelan were on the pitch. I remain unconvinced.
But Ireland won. Being an Ireland fan is a tad headwrecking at the moment, with a great disconnect between what we see when we watch the games on the one hand and the results on the other. Look at that table: second place, unbeaten with two (home) games to go. Imagine if Robbie Keane had scored with that chance at the end of the game in Bari! (Now now, don't torture yourself, F...)
Ireland have a friendly on Wednesday*, against South Africa in Limerick. But I — and many others, I suspect — will be watching Italy-Bulgaria instead. What would be a good result for Ireland? Part of me wants to be stoic about it and just watch the game and accept the result, whatever it is, in the knowledge that no amount of wishing on my part could possibly affect the outcome.
But who am I kidding?
A draw would keep Italy within reach and Bulgaria at a safeish (that's a big -ish) distance. A Bulgaria win will blow the group wide open, leaving anything possible. But Ireland, I fear, are not good enough to cash in on a chance to win the group. An Italy win would practically guarantee the latter first place and would mean that a win for Ireland in either of their last two games (vs. Italy — gulp — and Montenegro) would clinch second. (As to whether that would be good enough for a play-off place: I have no idea. It's Sunday. Sunday is no day to trying to figure stuff like that out.)
In sum: I know nothing.
* Ireland-South Africa is actually tomorrow, Tuesday. Some indication of how much I care about it, I think...
*
— When writing my post on the confused opinions on diving, I forwent the opportunity to bring up the issue of xenophobia: that it was easier for some in English football to be outraged by Eduardo's dive against Celtic because he wasn't one of their own. One reason for this omission is that the post was long enough as it was — I had to pick which parts of the topic I wanted to deal with. Another, though, is because I wasn't entirely confident on the matter. I had some nagging feeling that there was an it's-all-them-cheating-foreigners thing going on, at least in the media; but I was also willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, figuring that progress has been made since the days when, say, the Mirror could run with a front page headline reading "For you, Fritz, ze Euro 96 is over!" (Though Piers Morgan is still alive, so, y'know, anything's possible.) I just didn't feel equipped to wade in on the matter.
John Terry's comments on how English players just don't do that sort of thing ("I think sometimes as a country we're too honest": "as a country"! He actually said this!) came to light just as I was preparing the post for publication. I could have made reference to it, but it was very late at night and I was somewhat wired and I would have ended up using the word "cunt" a lot and there are only so many dozens of times you can do that before it gets gratuitous. So I let it be.
The press response to Wayne Rooney's dive in England's game against Slovenia has been mighty interesting. "There was no question of Rooney having dived, but he made a half-hearted penalty appeal and the Slovenia players were furious when Eriksson pointed to the spot," writes Dan King of the Mail on Sunday. "A dive? Gamesmanship? Rooney didn’t offer much of an appeal so you had to give him the benefit of the doubt," says Duncan White in the Sunday Telegraph. "It was not a dive, merely an inability to stay upright in a tangle with Slovenia's Bostjan Cesar," offers Paul Hayward in the Observer.
Even more starkly: "Not that Rooney should be condemned as a "cheat." This wasn't an 'Eduardo'. This was Rooney getting stuck in as Rooney does - and risking the wrath of the referee," reasons Rob Beasley in the News of the World. And watch four of Fleet Street's finest tie themselves up in knots about Rooney, and diving in general ("the last thing on Rooney’s mind, ever, is to go into the penalty area just for the purpose of trying to win a penalty"). (Video via 101 Great Goals.)
There is no difference between what Eduardo did against Celtic and what Rooney did against Arsenal. There is no difference between either of those two cases and what Rooney did yesterday. Yet, though Rooney's couple have certainly received more than their fair share of coverage, their has been little of the rush to label Rooney a cheat. This is especially interesting in the light of his own comments in the week.
So is there some strain of xenophobia underlying all this? If so, it's of a subtler brand than has been historically employed by elements of Her Maj's Press. But then, it usually is subtler these days (usually, I say, usually). Maybe it's just homerism. Perhaps these journalists are just trying to stay onside with Rooney, in the hope that they may still be allowed to talk to him in future, or in dread that their job will be made difficult for them in South Africa. (Perhaps they don't want to antagonise Sralex either.) Or maybe they are so stupid that they can't tell when someone is trying to cheat.
In sum: The debate on diving is way strange. A portion of England's football press are either xenophobes, liars, cocksuckers or morons. QED.
*
— Nicklas Bendtner scored a very nice goal yesterday...
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— ...against Portugal, who, despite their late equaliser, are in grave danger of not making the finals. Argentina are in for a rough ride in their efforts to qualify after losing to Brazil. So Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi may be absent next summer. North Korea will not, and Bosnia, Latvia, Gabon and Venezuela may all be present too.
*
— Finally, some links from the last few weeks, loosely connected by the theme of fandom:
So, then: diving. You know, I was thinking about writing something on the topic, what with all the fuss there has been after Eduardo's, shall we say, performance last week. But given how much has already been said, I imagined that you, darling reader, would probably be at saturation point by now, soaked to the bone with virtual spittle, and I thought it wise to refrain from dousing you further.
A lot of people think we should move on from the Eduardo affair, with minimum fallout and as quickly as we can, but a lot of people are wrong.
Wowser! That's me told. So, it's settled. Let's get to it. I'm certainly not going to be the one to disagree with Jim Lawton, now, am I?
Why are you looking at me like that?
Small wonder Lawton wants to keep the righteous flame burning. Consider the issues the episode has raised. After all, what Eduardo did was a prime example of "the scourge of cheating that has disfigured the game for so long" and has "infinitely reduced" football. While "Andrey Arshavin's goal [against Celtic] was a small masterpiece", it was "painted in a studio that had been made so squalid". Diving is "the most visible form of a rottenness that is now hopping from one sport to another like a monster flea".
It may be that Lawton's writings on the matter are a prose approximation of one of those cars that gets called "sensible" even as its exhaust pipe destroys entire species on the school run alone, but it nonetheless reflects the consensus which has underpinned the past week's debate in all its shades. This basis — whether you think that justice has been served in the form of Eduardo's two-game European ban, or that UEFA have manoeuvred themselves into such a dreadful spot that it may leave them no recourse but to close their eyes and try to wish themselves out of it — is that diving is utterly, irredeemably wrong. Not only that, but its practitioners occupy a special category of wrongness, like nonces or Bono.
And that's the problem. The entire discussion has been founded on a flawed calculation. The value of diving is not axiomatic but a variable in an equation full of them (despite the Daily Mail's ingenious satire). If this was a space mission, there would be an awkward conversation taking place right now between Houston and some seriously miffed astronauts.
For an example of the true fuzziness of the boundaries, take a look at what Volker Finke had to say recently. Finke, manager (for now, one gathers) of J-League team Urawa Red Diamonds, has attracted attention for his comments after one of his players did not go to ground when seemingly unfairly tackled in the penalty area. "That's what I'm the most angry about — him getting fouled and not falling down,"said Finke. "I'll give him a fair play medal." Motokai Inukai, president of the Japanese FA, reacted by questioning the very right of Finke to coach. "It's hopeless. Is that how low we have sunk?," the exasperated Inukai gasped.
But Finke had a point — a particularly pointy point at that. This incident — of a type which is commonplace — is not easily accommodated by the Mailesque urge to rigidly delineate morality (all the better to condemn you with...). If a player is fouled, but not in such a way that makes it blindingly obvious, can a player exaggerate the contact in order precisely to blind the ref with its obviousness? Some would say that two wrongs don't make a right. But one wrong doesn't make a right, either. If the application of justice is as inefficient as it evidently is, can a player not nudge justice in the right direction? But then, how can we trust the player to decide whether a challenge made on him is legal or not? And if the challengee can do this, can the challenger not claim it to be fine for him to, say, slyly pull an opponent's jersey next time around? And if he can do that, well...
In other words, diving is wrong is nothing to found a religion on. Indeed, Finke's mistake was not in believing that there exist legitimate occasions for diving, but — as noted by The Offside, while criticising Finke — in voicing it in so public a manner. For there are the Laws of the Game, but there are also the laws of the game. The Laws of the Game are quite clear on how they believe things should proceed. The laws of the game are also clear, but they are devilishly nuanced. And the first law of the game is: You don't talk about the laws of the game. Finke's error was more practical than moral.
If this strikes the reader as dangerous moral ambiguity: what can I say? Welcome to sport, stranger.
One person who has addressed this with honesty and perspicacity is Rob Marrs. On his blog, Left Back in the Changing Room, he has presented the case for permissible diving. (If Marrs was a football manager, you would already have read about this on the back page of a tabloid under the headline CHEATS' CHARTER!) In short, cheating is rife in football, in various forms, of which diving is but one. And defenders are able to get away with a hell of a lot more than attackers, from shirt-tugging to sneaky nudges in the back while contesting a high ball, via unseen handballs, persistent fouling and claiming throw-ins that aren't theirs. These acts occur far more frequently than diving, yet prompt virtually none of the fulmination and downright millennial angst inspired by artistic impression: 5.7.
If the talk since last Wednesday had really been about the morality of diving, and of Eduardo's effort in particular, our soccer media, mainstream and otherwise, would be permanently clogged with nothing but grief-stricken jeremiads on how the soul was being wrenched out of the game. (To those of you who are thinking that that's all we've been getting lately, be fair: we've had those glorious transfer rumours too...) Cheating happens and happens a lot, and the foundations of civilisation are none the weaker for it. What's so ridiculous about all this is that even though the argument has been couched in moral terms, it's really been about other things.
One of these is aesthetics. A dive looks worse than other kinds of cheating; it's more spectacular. It's not that it's sneaky — it's that sometimes it's not sneaky enough. Maybe it's how obvious it can be (especially when done badly) that affronts us. Maybe it's too visible a demonstration of the kind of thing that happens all the time, often when we — or the proxy we, the cameras — are not looking. It's a home truth.
Another actual point of discussion — and this ties in with the aesthetics — is technique. And it is here that the real silliness of this whole issue reveals itself. Here, we can even afford to overlook Celtic manager Tony Mowbray's rationalisation of Aiden McGeady's tumble which saw the wee tyke earn a second booking last Sunday. It wasn't a dive after all: "A dive is when you try to influence the referee, you throw your arms up and so on", said Mowbray sheepishly. (Mowbray has a way of making everything he says sound sheepish.)
Better instead to examine the reaction to the penalty incurred by Arsenal when Manuel Almunia was deemed to have fouled Wayne Rooney. Rooney dived just as surely as Eduardo did. The difference was that Rooney's legs made contact with the keeper's arms. The difference is not moral, but technical. Rooney was simply cannier than Eduardo. Or was he? The fact that Rooney and Almunia made contact and that Eduardo and Artur Boruc did not had little to do with the respective strikers and almost everything to do with the respective goalkeepers. The idea that a player's moral sense is dependent on the decision-making powers of another player is surely too undercooked not to vomit straight back up. That the referee was correct in awarding Rooney the penalty, as per the Laws of the Game, hammers home the primacy of the laws of the game. That Eduardo was, in fact, just as canny as Rooney at exploiting them — he won a penalty, too, remember — blows a hole right through to next-door's kitchen.
UEFA, one supposes, have banned Eduardo pour encourager les autres. It may even work, for a bit. But soon, someone will believe themselves to be cunning enough to gain an illicit advantage without punishment. They may be right; if not, someone eventually will be. And all this ignores the myriad of options available to the prospective nogoodnik. We could follow J-Law's reasoning and clamp down on all of these, too; this is the logical extension. Then we can finally place football on the position on the sporting spectrum we all so long for it to occupy: somewhere between Simple Simon and croquet.
This, of course, is impractical. Competition is the essence of sport, and cheating is an inevitable by-product. Lawton's characterisation of it as a "contagion" is wrong. It presumes the fallacy that sport begins in a state of purity, that dives make baby Jesus cry. But competition comes with impurity as standard. Human behaviour will never fully be legislated, no matter how sharp the law's teeth. Not only would it be Sisyphean to try to eradicate cheating: it would be undesirable, too. You could only do it by eliminating competition. Eliminate competition from sport and ... well, have you seen line dancing?
The prohibitionist rage against diving that periodically froths like it has lately demonstrates little more than how disproportionately discombobulated one can get about a peeve. Because a peeve is all this is, as surely as a dislike of people who drop litter is. As Marrs says, "the problem here is that football doesn't know what to do about diving because, as with other things within the game, we are rife with hypocrisy and general refereeing inconsistency". (For what it's worth, I think that refereeing inconsistency is far more a product of human nature and how damn difficult it is to oversee a football match than it is of incompetence.) Before we unleash our inner Moral Majoritarian, we would be well advised to get things in proportion and to ensure that we have our terms straight. Until then:
