Soccer is Dead

Soccer is not dead, and calling it soccer is just the Irish psyche distancing itself from Association Football's 'prissy' nonsense. Last night's Champion's League game showed the side of football you would imagine FIFA should abhor; a master performance in defending yes, but also a display in gamesmanship the game could do without. A Mayo man at the National League Final last weekend was heard describe the referee as prissy, (the Mayo team awol as ever in Croke Park) you'd imagine he'd have had the same opinion of every Inter Milan player on the field in the Nou Camp, but the Gaelic and Association versions of the game are quite different when it comes to acceptable physical contact. Inter Milan were very effective, they came to do a job and did it well. They played ugly! They played 'fairly' - or what FIFA apparently deem fairly! And they played dead whenever a breath of physical contact was made.

Football is not dead; last year the Champions League Final was the most watched sporting event on the planet, for the first time beating the SuperBowl, but despite that football does still need to evaluate is policies on fairness. As Irish men, the pain of 'Hand of Frog' isn't likely to ever to be forgotten, but at least we now sympathise with the English for its prequel. That was debated long and hard, there is a more pressing issue - FIFA does have rules regarding play acting, it calls it 'simulation', but does laregly noting about it, surely, at the very least retrospective yellow cards at the highest level for simulation and blatant play-acting ought to be considered. Maicon's display in the right back corner where he got injured off the pitch and came back on to fall down and stop the game was appalling. Busquet's over-reaction that resulted in Motta's sending off was bad too, but both are tragically commonplace in the game, and what is done at the highest level is what is repeated by the under-10s around the world. Football's popularity is never likely to see a decline, but of its morality FIFA seems indifferent despite its claims.