99 posts later, there are still lines being crossed...or not

Ninety-nine posts ago, What Would David Bowie Do? made its debut with a lengthy diatribe about England's ignominious departure from the 2010 World Cup.

It was an angry rant, with its bile composed of England's piss-poor performance in South Africa, their ejection by Germany yet again, by the fact it was written exceedingly early on a Monday morning and during an arduous daily train ride to a destination I was growing decidedly antsy about, and by virtue of me being in a generally foul frame of mind, the reasons for which are best left unmentioned.

Viewed from a better perspective, the root of my bateyness was the fact that during England's final 16 encounter with Germany, Frank Lampard's delightful 38th-minute chip had bounced off the German bar and across the line so far the ball ended up in a different post code. Millions watching around the world saw it cross the line, as did most of the 40,510 spectators inside the Free State Stadium. I missed it as I was, at the time, somewhere beneath the English Channel where technology has yet to find a means of relaying radio signals. As it transpired, I wasn't alone in missing it: Uruguayan referee Jorge Larrionda, his two assistants and FIFA's fourth and fifth officials had also blinked just as the ball crossed the line.

It is unfortunately circuitous, then, that WWDBD?'s 100th post should fall on the occasion of another refereeing howler, again involving a team featuring Lampard, albeit with the prolific midfielder being on the victorious side this time. Chelsea's second "goal" in yesterday's FA Cup Semi-Final against Tottenham is not one I, as a Blues fan, will be particularly proud of. But if I'm uncomfortable at the goal standing, referee Martin Atkinson should be hiding his head in shame at allowing such a comical decision to stand.

Larrionda is said to have exclaimed "Oh my God!" when he later saw a replay of Lampard's disallowed goal. I wonder how hard and jagged was the item Atkinson swallowed when he saw video of various Spurs and Chelsea players bundled together like newly-betrothed snakes as Juan Mata's shot bounced off the sole of Benoit Assou-Ekotto's boot, effectively still in play.

According to Harry Redknapp, the referee has at least copped to his mistake: “[He's] watched it now and says he feels worse than I do. I said, ‘I don’t think so’. But he says he feels bad," the Spurs manager said afterwards. “He knows he’s made a mistake and he says he’ll have a bad week as well.”

So here we go with wave upon wave of renewed calls for goal-line technology and shallow defensive comments about referees being "only human", and indeed some are. Some are also splendidly gullible.

The argument against technology, certainly, is no longer tenable. When there are so many cameras around the ground that players can be punished retrospectively for off-ball incidents, it seems nonsense that decisions can't be made instantly when a disputed goal is scored. Or not.

Introducing technology has nothing to do with messing with the traditions of the game or even challenging the authority of the man in the middle. It's just that the pace of football now, coupled with the level of scrutiny afforded everyone except the match officials themselves is such that without technology they are disadvantaged.

We shall never know whether, had the goal been disallowed, the 5-1 scoreline would have been any different. It's possible that Spurs could have rallied, and beaten Chelsea handsomely. England, had Lampard's goal stood, may have also gone on to trounce Germany (although only the most myopic England supporter would have expected that, given the team's abject displays in the three games prior).

The absence of technology to conclude irrevocably that a goal had been scored has left us, yet again with more questions about how good our referees are in another weekend of big clubs, big decisions and big mistakes. There also remains questions about the moral fidelity of players. Diving, "simulation" or just plain old 'cheating' has rarely been further from attention than as now. So is there a difference between Ashley Young winning his second penalty in a week through another challenge to Tom Daley as Britain's greatest diving hope, and a ball not crossing the line, the referee attesting that it did, and the player with a claim to the 'goal' wheeling away as if he'd just struck a blinder?

To be fair to Juan Mata, the rush of blood to the head after you've put the ball in the back of the net (or at least sent it in that general direction) will blind the player to all other rational thought. Wembley is a magical place, and it's not just English schoolboys who dream of scoring on its hallowed turf. Can you really blame Mata for celebrating having, in his mind, added his name to Wembley lore?

And what about John Terry - should he have offered to set Atkinson straight? His admission, later, that "I thought it hit me and stayed out" does beg the response "Well, why didn't you tell the ref, then?" but given the season Chelsea's players have had, least of all Terry, it would take a particularly unusual player to have not taken that "ghost goal". It's not, either, as if it killed the game. Spurs are made of stronger fibre than that, and the fact that they clawed one back via Chelsea's season-long gappy defence, shows they weren't - at that point at least - going to just put their feet up. Until, of course, tiredness crept in, heads dropped and Florent Malouda, of all people, poked home Chelsea's fifth goal, following Ramires' cool third and Lampard's spectacular fourth.

I'll take that 5-1 win over Tottenham, but in my heart I'll regard it as 4-1. It's still an impressive scoreline for a Wembley encounter. The only note of real discomfort is the small minority who chose to disrespect the memories of the Hillsborough 96 and Livorno's Piermario Morosini, who collapsed and died 31 minutes into his Serie B game against Pescara the day before.

Football is only a game. It has its flaws and imperfections, but it is only a game. Spurs fans will be smarting, but compared with an FA Cup Semi-Final played on April 15th, 23 years ago, they will at least be able to go on smarting about a poor piece of refereeing for the weeks to come, as opposed to mourning the loss of 96 fellow human beings who left their homes one morning to watch a football match, and never came back. And that is something no replay can ever explain and certainly no technology can ever revoke.

Blattered beyond belief

So now we know who will host the World Cup Finals in 2018. It won't be England. It won't be Spain and Portugal. It won't be the Netherlands and Belgium. It will be Russia.

Sepp Blatter has, like the Vatican chimney, issued forth the puff of white smoke that has identified which country will enjoy the lucrative host nation status, seven years and eight months from now.

The inevitable media inquest is already blaming the media itself. The BBC's decision to screen a Panorama investigation into alleged FIFA corruption, just four days before the vote, is bearing the brunt of this backlash. Even Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin has helpfully chimed in that the British media was to blame (a kind of reverse of the famous headline IT'S THE SUN WOT WON IT). But I disagree.

Panorama's somewhat underwhelming exposé and the original Sunday Times scoop may well have coloured opinions within FIFA about England as a nation, but I don't think it made a blind bit of difference to the vote. FIFA had wanted to see a World Cup staged in Eastern Europe, as much as it chose Qatar - a nation smaller than the Falkland Islands - over the United States to host the competition in 2022.

If FIFA had simply come out and said that they wanted Russia to stage it, they could have saved us all the bother - and all the nudge-nudge, wink-winking about what's been going on behind closed and not-so closed doors in the run-up to the Zurich vote. 

Rightly or wrongly, the Sunday Times and the BBC have shone the spotlight on an institution which is, at best, out of touch with modern corporate transparency, and at worst, rotten to its core. Alleged bribery nothwithstanding, the World Cup voting process has been carried out with all the objectivity and probity of the Eurovision Song Contest, determined by hotel corridor politicking and schmoozing amid clouds of cigar smoke and the fumes of a glass of Remy Martin.

To learn, as we have done now, that England failed at the first round of voting makes a mockery of some of the early optimism and even positive indications coming from some of the voting members. England, we're told, had the best presentation, the best bid, and the personal involvement of Prince William, David Beckham and David Cameron (whom, we were told at every opportunity, had shuttled between Zurich and Westminster for PMQs and back again. Bravo, Dave! You're clearly one of the people).

England's 2018 bid ticked - on paper at least - all the right boxes. It would have rewarded the world with the authentic football experience in the very country where it all began. Football would have come home: there's a reason the English Premier League is the most televised football league around the world; there's a reason the FA Cup is one of the most popular annual events around the world. It would have all been good. Even the Dutch and the Spanish - who were also bidding for 2018 - were saying that England should win it.

Sadly, England's fate was sealed long before Wills straightened his comb-over and made any awful jokes about his own "big event". We English pride our sense of fair play. We take pride in queuing and pour scorn on any Johnny Foreigner who disrespects our love of manners, decency and refined order. We dislike cheating and dishonesty. The World Cup is not just a sporting extravaganza, but an enormous enterprise for FIFA and host nation alike. And yet it's location is determined by a process akin to a chief constable "seeing what he can do" about the parking ticket of a fellow mason. 

And what of the winning bid? We should, I suppose, congratulate Russia. No, really. We know that it will be a shambles; the fan experience will be dreadful, the racist culture in Russian football will not be solved, the public transport will be a disaster, the hotels will be inadequate, the stadia will be badly built with Mafia money, the visa process will be inflexible, and the overall infrastructure a mess. But FIFA has got what it wanted - a World Cup in the east.

So why go through a bid process in the first place? Why not accept the bag of roubles and have done with the circus that rolled into Zurich this week? The probity of the FIFA voting process should be called into question. It obviously has nothing to do with integrity, national reputation or even the ability to present a viable proposition, but personal favours, personal interests and...well, who knows what else? It's clear the whole thing is as bent and crooked as a DVD sold at a street market. 

FIFA is not an administrative organisation, but a political gentlemen's club where networking and influence is currency. It is run with stunning arrogance by a leadership that considers proven acts of bribery worthy only of the equivalent of wrapped knuckles. Perhaps, on reflection, England shouldn't want to be awarded a World Cup as a result of the back-handers and two-faced deceit that went on.

This is the second World Cup disaster England has suffered this year; but whereas the England team's ejection from South Africa in June was rightfully blamed on poor performance, few could fault the impressive show put on by the England 2018 bid team to try and swing votes their way.  

The sad part is that England won't get an opportunity to bid again until the process begins for the 2030 World Cup. 66 years since the Jules Rimet trophy was last presented on English soil to the world champion of football. And that's an awful lot of hurt.

Orange Appeal

Having lived outside of Britain for the last 11 years, I regularly get asked what I think has changed in my home country while I’ve been away. Apart from the proliferation of conversations in Polish, Russian and Korean, the biggest difference is that the country is now bright yellow.

Britain is so bright yellow now, it positively hums with fluorescence. This isn’t because of a jaundice pandemic, as far as I know, but the result of a Health & Safety culture that makes it virtually impossible to step into the open air without putting on a ‘high-visibility’ jacket first.

Nothing and no one is immune: what started out as a safety vest for road workers extends now to anyone who might be put in harm’s way by, well, anything. Bus drivers, cyclists, postal workers, factory employees, cleaners, gardeners, architects, ambulance crews, builders, miscellaneous council employees, railway workers, film crews, anyone at an airport, horse riders, policemen – even police horses – are all required to wear them, lest they come to harm going about their daily business.

The Dutch, of course, suffer from a related strain of this condition, in that they are required, by law, to wear bright orange at moments of national importance. Come April 30th - Koninginnedag (the former Dutch queen’s birthday) - the nation’s torsos and homesteads are adorned in orange to accompany the consumption of ocean-scale quantities of Heineken. Presumably this is to cushion the impact of the retinal damage caused by wearing such a vibrant hue.

For international football tournaments the custom is applied with even greater gusto. For the last few weeks, the Netherlands has been ablaze with orange. It has been worn with a ubiquity not seen since Chairman Mao declared green to be 'in' for the autumn collection of 1949. Everyone – and I mean everyone (or at least almost everyone) - has been wearing it in support of the national team’s progression through the World Cup.

Even the ever-present risk of the Dutch team imploding mid-way through the tournament doesn’t dampen any fervour for wearing the colour with pride. Ironically, during the 2008 European championships in Austria and Switzerland, the Swiss national railway ordered its workers to switch from orange reflective vests to yellow after clearly confused Dutch fans followed trackside engineers on to tracks like inebriated rats walking behind the Pied Piper.

You clearly have to hand it to the Dutch for their passion in following the Oranje, even if the Dutch themselves express a bashful anxiety when asked about the prospects of their team in the competition itself. Long before the first Jabulani had been kicked in anger on June 11, those in the know had been talking up the Netherlands as dark horses for the World Cup.

Many Dutch failed to give more than sporting chance to their heroes reaching the quarter-finals, let alone the final itself. But they did: Bert van Marwijk’s strategy of discipline and organisation mixed with some expressive wide football from the likes of Arjen “Wobbly” Robben, Robin van Persie, Dirk Kuyt and player-du jour Wesley Sneijder got them to only their third World Cup Final.

True, throughout the tournament the Nederlands Elftaal didn't play with any notable flair, but they deserved to reach their chance in the final. Up until Howard Webb blew his whistle to get the game under way, they'd played six and won six, scored 12 and conceded five. They had just gotten on with the job. They had won by the right margins and beat the teams they were supposed to beat. Capice, Fabio?

Furthermore, in Sneijder, the Dutch had a player who, fresh from winning Italian league and cup and Champions League medals, looked like a polished gem. Even Arjen Robben managed to stay on his feet for most of his matches, and to his credit, stayed upright in the final while under pressure from Puyol. Normally Robben runs an ever-present risk of buckling like a new-born springbok when faced with gusts of wind, comments about his receding hairline or goalkeepers looking at him ‘funny’. But not this time.

Sadly, though, despite their creditable progression through to the showpiece finale, and despite the fervent support back home, van Marwijk's side blew their opportunity to erase still-lingering bitterness about 1974 and 1978 with such negative tactics. For all the orange that poured through Amsterdam's streets like a glorious torrent of nationhood, it was a shame the team such fervency backed played in such a dull, stifling manner. At nine minutes into extra time it could have been nine minutes into the first half.

Did Spain deserve to win? Maybe. For too long they've been the team that never did, poor shadows at international level of one of the best leagues in world football. Their underlying class finally shone through at the right time, even if the Spanish played their part in ensuring we had to endure the dullest World Cup Final in living memory.

In the end... Well, in the end, we got a result, and nothing more. It was an anti-climax that did little justice to the home support. The pundits had predicted an exciting final. Even that bloody octopus shook a tentacle at the prospect of seeing something good. We didn't, but as the last can of Grolsch gets drained, and a dejected nation cycles home, they can take some credit for the way they get behind their national team. Even if it is a gesture as simple as putting on an orange T-shirt. Hup, Holland, Hup!!

Redefining schadenfreude: England’s balls-up

Let the wailing and gnashing of teeth begin. Actually, it has well and truly begun already. England are heading home from South Africa, heads bowed, and the media left to rant and rave about six million-a-year Fabio, his 23 overpaid superstars, and the failure to raise their game beyond plain ordinary.

Had they beaten Germany yesterday, we’d have been hailing it The Greatest Thing Ever. We’d have declared a national holiday; streets would have been named Capello Way and Gerrard Gardens (Wales already has Barry Island); bunting would have adorned every dwelling; the Cross of St. George would have flown from every rooftop south of Hadrian’s; and our glorious tabloid press would have fizzed with glee in trotting out the usual slew of lame and lazy taunts echoing events of 70 years ago.

Instead, there is castigation and retort, rumblings and retribution about Uruguayan incompetence, FIFA intransigence, and managerial stubbornness. Oh, and not to mention the fact the ball was too round, amongst an ever-lengthening list of excuses that fail to accept that, simply, England weren’t up to it.

Refreshingly, it is the German press who are enjoying themselves the most: “Now we are quits,” snorted Die Welt, reflecting ongoing Teutonic nark about some linesman’s error 44 years ago. Others, benevolently, even went so far as to suggest that a refereeing blunder meant the result was meaningless. Alas, sweet sentiment, but of little consequence. The better team won, point.

Who knows how long the English grizzling will last this time: probably longer than a Garth Crooks comment. As the knives sharpen for Capello’s inevitable discussion with the FA (ergo, another expensive failure heads off to lucrative pastures new) England fans are left to lick their wounds.

To be honest, we shouldn’t feel wounded. Embarrassed, yes, but nothing more. The game against lowly Slovenia not withstanding, England’s brief appearance at this World Cup was mostly poor. The game against a spirited United States should have been the kick in shorts they needed. Apparently not. For what followed became etched in footballing lore – for a few days at least - as The Worst Football Game I Have Ever Seen™. Except it wasn’t. Worse was to come. And it came in the form of a showdown against the exotically-coiffured Joachim Löw’s team of young Jäger.

Defensive blunders were coupled with ineffective attacking which, in turn, was marred by the inflexibility of a system and a coach who refused to budge and change things when it was needed. Joe Cole may not have been the fittest player on the bench, but his effort, commitment and, if nothing else, his open-mouthed lolling, would have made something of a difference, somewhere.

Lampard’s goal-that-wasn’t may be the focus of some ire, but really we should have no complaints. England really had no expectation of going all the way at this World Cup. Yes, we all dreamt it [again], some even thought it possible. Yes, they qualified fairly (please note M. Henry), but they weren’t exactly convincing during the run-up (“shouldn’t worry, they’re only friendlies, they don’t count”). Blind faith always prevails when it comes to England.

England, like the uppity French and the gravitationally challenged Italians, flattered to deceive yet again. Rooney failed to live up to his Player of the Year accolade and not even the goal-that-wasn’t did anything to help Lampard’s reputation as arguably the best midfield engine in the world…er...when he’s not wearing an England shirt.

But it would be wrong to single out individuals. Whether they played badly or were played badly, it’s a team sport, and the team failed to live up to reputation, let alone expectation.

I hope our collective hubris has been dealt a fatal blow by this result. I’m glad the nation got behind the team; I’m glad the pubs were full and the supermarkets empty; I’m glad houses and cars alike were proudly flying the flag. But really.

To use my favourite footballing prefix, at the end of the day we just don’t know. “Football,” maintains Danny Baker, “is chaos”. You can’t predict it, you can’t pre-program it. You just have to endure it.