One of the annual traditions in newspapers at end of each year is to review the past twelve months. I seldom read them for,
although I believe you can learn from the past, I would rather look to the future.
However, there was one such article in the sports columns of a national newspaper that caught my eye with its title, ‘2009 - The year of the Cheat’. The article covered all sports and had quite a selection of cheating moments to choose from. There was the Formula 1 driver who on instructions from his management team deliberately crashed his car to enable his team mate to win. I don’t know how that works but apparently the costs of repairing such an expensive vehicle was worth it. Then there was the blood scandal in rugby union, a sport which above all claims to uphold fair play, As far as I understand it, the only way to have the player replaced for a vital goal kicking attempt, was by having a blood injury, so the coach had the player carry a blood capsule which could be burst at the appropriate time.
There were two publicised incidents of cheating in football still fresh in the mind. Probably the most high profile of these was the handball in the Ireland v France world cup qualifying game that was to decide who would be going through to the finals. I’m sure no-one needs reminding that it was Thierry Henry’s handball that enabled William Gallis to score, putting France on the plane to South Africa. The other incident was Ngog of Liverpool gaining a penalty with a dive, rescuing his team from defeat.
What was that old saying when we were kids, ‘cheats never prosper’? Well they clearly do. Apart from diving and handball there are other forms of cheating.
When I was refereeing a game earlier this season a team captain appealed for a corner when it was clearly a goal kick, ‘Ah well,’ he said, ‘it was worth a try.’ ‘Was it?’ I asked, ‘isn’t that another form of cheating?’
Then there is the ‘stealing’ of ten or fifteen yards at a throw-in, isn’t that just cheating? And what about the ever increasing scourge of shirt-pulling? That’s something I don’t recall as a problem in my early days in the game has now seemingly become an pandemic. Players like Didier Drogba have become serial shirt-pullers.
Does it matter? The worrying thing is that some people do not seem to believe that these forms of cheating are out of place. When Micah Richards rather obviously pulled on Louis Saha’s shirt to give away a penalty in the Everton/ Manchester City match, City’s new manager, Roberto Mancini, seemed to suggest that in Italy a little shirt-pulling would not have been treated so harshly.
Of course I would be accused of being politically incorrect if I suggested that this plague of cheating was all the fault of imported foreign players and managers, but I read a book last year entitled ‘Watching the English, The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour’ In this, Kate Fox tried to establish whether we had lost our national identity or whether there was such a thing as Englishness. One thing she discovered was that foreigners and immigrants commented on the English sense of fair play. ‘You take it for granted,’ one Polish immigrant complained, “you assume that people will play fair and you are shocked and upset when they do not. In other countries there is not that assumption.”
'Fair play' is defined as not gaining an unfair advantage, observing the rules and not cheating. ‘So we may be a bit dull and exceptionally moderate,’ Kate Fox said, ‘but perhaps without wishing to become all patriotic, the fair play ideal is something we could still take a bit of pride in.’ I’m with Kate.
Dick Sawdon Smith
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