11:29am Friday 20th November 2009
By Jo Rooney
This has not been a good week for Ireland, the all-round nice guys of international sport.
Their fans are generally happy whatever the outcome of any sporting contest, always willing to drink the pub dry, regardless of whether they’ve seen their cricketers stun Pakistan or their rugby heroes dumped out of the World Cup by Argentina.
But even their resolve will have been tested by events at Stade de France on Wednesday night.
When I say events, I mean one in particular, of course – Thierry Henry’s unforgivable act of cheating.
Cue cries of outrage from Henry admirers the world over, but they haven’t really got a leg to stand on.
I’m not saying Henry is not one of the greatest players to have graced the Premier League; his myriad magic moments and stunning goals will live long in the memory for all football fans, not just Arsenal supporters.
But, on Wednesday night, faced with an instantaneous decision to cheat or not, he chose the former. And sadly, like his fellow artisan and countryman Zinedine Zidane before him, an ugly moment of madness is likely to become his legacy.
It was enough to secure a World Cup place for a team that had been soundly outplayed over two legs by Ireland and proved again that, sometimes, cheats do prosper.
The Irish players to a man, including former Brentford player Stephen Hunt on the bench, were apoplectic – when you see the mild-mannered Shay Given react the way he did, you know something is up.
It’s hard to blame them when they were already rightly feeling aggrieved at the 11th-hour decision to seed the play-off draw, a cynical ploy designed to get the big names to South Africa that, essentially, did its job.
Bizarrely, the whole sordid saga was succinctly summed up by motormouth pundit Ian Wright, who said: “Imagine if it was England.”
Just imagine. At the very least, Swedish referee Martin Hansson and his compatriot running the line would have been hounded out of the game by now, Urs Meier-style.
England supporters – Gunners fans included – would be burning effigies of the once-revered Henry, and the Sun might even have given away a Va-Va-Voodoo doll of the striker with every edition.
Make no mistake, the Irish have a case – unfortunately, however, they will not have their wish for the match to be replayed granted, and it is also unlikely that Henry will face any official sanctions. Things like that just don’t happen to the ‘big’ nations.
What must happen, though, is that FIFA finally introduce video technology to eliminate this kind of contentious incident tarnishing results in the future.
Critics argue that it holds up the game – but the fact it took two minutes to restart Wednesday’s game due to Irish protests makes a mockery of that.
A five-second glance at the replay would have revealed that Henry moved his hand to scoop the ball to prevent it going out of play, meaning the referee could have disallowed the goal, given Henry a yellow card and the match resumed with an Irish free-kick.
The French might have scored five minutes later anyway. They may have won on penalties. Or Ireland might have. It doesn’t matter. What does matter is that the result – and the ultimate prize of a place in the World Cup – was decided by a premeditated act of dishonesty from someone who likes to come across as one of football’s nice guys.
Votre génie défectueux est exposé, Thierry.
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