World Cup Nonsense

[Sweder]

We've found a witch - shall we burn her?

OK, you saw this coming.
Sweder’s a die-hard MU Rowdy - who else to leap to the defence of the new nemesis of English football, Christiano Ronaldo?

Except I’m not.
At least, I shall not begin to attempt to defend his petulance, his unsportsmanlike conduct, his penchant for kissing the turf at the first whiff of a tackle, his ridiculous and ill-thought-out wink at the bench.
All these things are true, and the lad should be rightly castigated for them.

No, what makes me at best uneasy and at worse sick to my stomach is the way our ‘sporting’ nation has heaped the woes of our poor cheated team on the broad shoulders of this Portuguese trickster. Newspaper headlines scream, photo-shopped images fly around the internet, vitriolic text messages fill the air and football fans loudly discuss their preferred form of death for The Man That Stole The World Cup From England.

But he didn’t.
There was no ‘Hand of God’ here. Diego Maradonna, beloved in the football world, revered as (sickeningly) ‘the greatest player ever to have kicked a ball’ by many of the same nicotine-stained hacks now publicly carving up Scolari’s number seventeen at every turn. Maradonna was a cheat. More to the point, he actually cheated England out of a possible World Cup win. Somehow this act of a man quick to embrace drugs and sloth, rather than condeming the player to eternal damnation, has added to his global portfolio.

Ronaldo exacerbated a situation created by that nastiest of pieces of work Ricardo Cavalho and the petulance of a frustrated Wayne Rooney. Carvalho has spent the last two seasons in the Premiership pulling shirts, kicking shins, pinchin nipples and tugging leg hairs. OK, he plays for Chelski so I'm never going to love him, but he blatantly cheats in game after game. He has a face I could just never tire of hitting.

Rooney was a powder keg from minute one; a mushroom cloud-laying m*therf*cker, to steal from Samuel L. Jackson. Consigned by his inept manager to plough a lonely furrow, Tabloid Wayne seethed and boiled as he saw the game pass him by. The moment Carvalho’s ‘tomatoes’ leaped out of his shorts and attacked Wayne’s metatarsal the Saviour of English Football had is name down for an early bath. How do we know? Because the referee, complicit in allowing the two Portuguese players to kick lumps out of the lad until he finally lashed out, has told us so.

In the rarefied atmosphere of the Blame Game played out on our TV screens and our newspapers we see the pattern emerge. In ’98 it was the photogenic darling of English football who took the full force of a nation wronged; burning effigies followed Beckham's tabloid obituaries. The real villain of the piece, Diego Simeone, having recklessly clattered the Boy David with a challenge not out of place in the WWF, escaped so much as a yellow card.

Directed by Sven-gali we now choose to turn our ire onto another soft target.
‘Don’t kill him’ begged the Swede, his hang-dog expression explained by the weight of FA gold bullion lining his blazer pockets. So off we went, determined that someone would ‘die’ for this 'heinous crime'. Ronaldo did himself no favours; the pre-match wind-up, the wink at the bench; but surely his greatest sin was to out-shine our lethargic midfield? He played with passion; his blood was up. He took his penalty like a man; he kissed the ball, he stared Robinson in the eye and with a fearsome strike condemned the greatest band of underachievers ever sent from these shores to the hotel check-out. Did his manager issue a call to arms before the match? Did he tell his players to wind up the opposition, to go out there and die for their country?
I’d bet my house on it.

What hurts me most is we castigate an opposing player for doing what we accept from one of our own; playing his heart out for his country. ‘But he dives’ you wail; ‘he cheats! It’s not fair!’
Hmm. I don’t remember anyone wailing or gnashing their teeth when Peter Crouch attempted to scalp the T&T fullback as he headed in England’s first. The BBC ran slo-mos as the pundits giggled in the background.
‘Who cares?’ quipped Alan Shearer. Shearer deserves a cameo in the next Johnny Depp Piratical classic; he’s already got the one-eyed stare down.
Don't tell me Joe Cole doesn't hit the deck at the drop of a hat. Or that Micheal Owen never once took a slightly dodgy tumble in the opposition box. Think Argentina in 2002. Was that a wink I saw there, Micheal?

‘Rooney should stick one on him’ suggested the King of Tyneside after England’s exit. I do hope he was referring to the man who made absolutely sure that any talent our team possessed was strangled, who singularly failed to inspire our band of ‘world-beaters’, and who rides off into the sunset, his saddle-bags groaning, to pastures new and lucrative.

Good luck Italy.

Despite all the shenanigans at home you have played some excellent football in a tournament which, if we’re honest, has been decidedly ordinary so far.

Cannavaro has to be the player of the tournament. I only hope he heads for the Premiership in the wake of the fall-out from Serie A. His performance against Germany was sublime – Bobby Moore would have enjoyed it I’m certain. And I hope Rio Ferdinand watched carefully.
Now there’s a ball-playing defender, Rio.