Ireland frozen out as Italian hopes go for a Burton

England are two fifths of the way to a Grand Slam; or, more probably, two fifths of the way to winning two Six Nations matches out of five.  Saturday's win in the Roman snow showed a certain degree of character but little else.  When they meet a team better at scoring tries than Scotland – which is to say, anybody else – or with a better fly half than the Italians – see above – they might find themselves in a spot of bother.


If Italy had a fly half capable of playing at anything on speaking terms with international standard, they would have walloped England, who froze figuratively as well as quite literally on what passed for the pitch at the Stadio Olimpico.


At least England have a coach who can make effective substitutions.  After 51 minutes, Ben Morgan and Lee Dickson replaced Phil Dowson at Number 8 and Ben Youngs at scrum half to good effect.  Youngs, who looks like a scrum half who could do with being taken out of the limelight for a while, had looked a shadow of his former self.  The introduction of Dickson gave England a sort of purpose and organization in attack lacking in the first half; though again they were dependent on a charge-down try from fly-half Charlie Hodgson to seal a narrow victory.

Hodgson played well enough to give Toby Flood cause for concern that he will not cheerfully walk straight back into the team when he is up to Test match fitness.  He played flat, with discipline and a little vision; admittedly modest virtues, yet utterly beyond poor old Kristopher Burton.  Burton was born in Brisbane yet, had he remained in Australia, would have no more chance of being selected for the Wallabies as Libby Kennedy.

He was replaced at fly-half by Tobias Botes, whose Wikipedia article states that he normally plays as a scrum half.  He ought to stick to the day job as his kicking was worse than Burton's, and that was some achievement.  In the 2009 meeting at Twickenham, flanker Mauro Bergamasco was shoe-horned in at scrum-half and had a nightmare, gifting a first Test try to Riki Flutey and passing the ball with a level of inaccuracy which would shame a boy on the playing fields of Ampleforth College.  No longer are those forty minutes of misadventure the worst individual performance by an Italian in the Six Nations championship.

England, alas, cannot play Scotland's backs and Italy's half-backs every week.  Wales, who made light work of an ill-disciplined Scotland side at the Millennium Stadium, will be favourites to complete a Triple Crown at Twickenham on 25 February

There was only slightly less good rugby played at the Stade de France, and only because there was no rugby at all; not even of any kind.  Match referee Dave Pearson took the sensible decision to call off the match due to a dangerously frozen pitch.

All of which was very fine and proper, but the knowledge that many of the fans travelling from Ireland or the south of France will be neither able to afford nor inclined to return when the match in eventually staged – it is expected to be re-arranged for the weekend of 2-3 March – does give call to some pertinent questions.

Not least, why, having experienced the freezing Parisian weather every night of the last week, could the authorities not have foreseen such problems?  As the Stade de France has no under-soil heating (it is built on an old methane field, so it isn't just Twickenham that's built on old farts, &c. and so on…) it was never likely that the pitch would be playable for a kick-off at 9pm local time.  France must not be allowed to schedule a Six Nations match at the stadium so late in the evening again.

Could the kick-off time have been brought forward?  The details of the question are not known to your humble servant, so we will draw a veil over it – not that doing so to the St-Denis pitch did it any good.  If France are to win the Grand Slam, they will probably have to do so playing four Tests in four weeks.

Liverpool walk alone after day of shame

The most pernicious aspect of the fallout of the Luis Suárez-Patrice Evra race row is not Liverpool’s paranoia.  It is not the half-baked conspiracy theories, which propagate the theory that the FA’s independent panel was in hock with Sir Alex Ferguson.

It was not the crass error of those infernal tee-shirts worn before the match at Wigan Athletic; nor the refusal on Saturday of Suárez (culprit) to shake the hand of Evra (victim).  Nor is it the constant low-level hum of accusations that Evra is a liar with form – it was Mike Phelan, not Evra, that made the accusations against the member of Chelsea’s ground staff – or the absurd notion that because it is OK to call somebody a negro in Uruguay we must tolerate it here.  Uruguay, clearly, is not a country which ought to be used when setting our threshold of racial sensitivity.

Nor was it the preposterous apology for an interview given by Kenny Dalglish after Saturday’s match, in which Sky Sports interviewer Geoff Shreeves was said to be ‘bang out of order’ for suggesting the horrible atmosphere at the game might have had something to do with Suárez’s refusal of Evra’s hand.

Nor, even, is it the ghastly, brutal tribalism involved with Manchester United and Liverpool, which gives cause for sections of their support to give choral welcome to two of the most painful events in the history of English football: the Munich air crash and the Hillsborough tragedy.

It is the perpetuation of the belief by which schoolyard bullies maintain a vice-like grip over their prey; by which inner-city drugs gangs perpetuate their freedom to act with contempt for society; and by which, for many decades, footballers got away with racially abusing others players.  It is the reason why the Uruguayan press have turned their fire towards Evra, and why one dunderheaded corresponded sent a letter to the Sunday Times justifying the booing of Evra at Anfield in the recent FA Cup encounter because he ‘…has not acted like a man.’

It is, in short, the notion of the accursed Code of the Pitch.  The notion that whatever happens on the field should stay on the field, and that there is no creature lower in the social order than a ‘grass’.  The notion that, had it succeeded in bullying Evra out of maintaining his charge – fully and transparently proven, lest we forget – against Suárez, would have threatened to return us to the bad old days of a conspiracy of silence.

Could you blame a young black player – perhaps less established in the Premier League than Evra, who is, after all, the captain of Manchester United – for thinking that reporting any future racist language that might come their way might simply not be worth the hassle?

Let’s put it another way: do enough white people in Britain care enough about racism?  Are there still people for whom the battle against racially insensitive language is an encumbrance which must be tolerated, rather than a virtuous part of the evolution of our society?  Is that why Evra is being vilified by some for ‘making a fuss about’ being called a negro?  Is that why he was, with grotesque predictability, so loudly and crassly booed at Anfield in Juanuary?

Sunday’s apologies, from Dalglish and Suárez, at least present a kernel of progress.  It is the first time that Liverpool Football Club have, to any extent, acknowledged any wrongdoing on their part.  Yet there has still been no apology from Suárez for the incident that started the whole infernal affair.  He has still not told Evra that he regrets calling him a negro.

That this is the case maintains the worry that Suárez still believes he is the victim, both of a malicious accusation by Evra and of British ‘political correctness gone mad’.  But, in hoping that all who sail in her respect racial sensitivies, Britain has aped Ebeneezer Scrooge towards the end of A Christmas Carol.  “I haven’t taken leave of my senses, Cratchet.  I’ve come to them.”

Ireland and Wales serve feast after Calcutta Cup famine

Is there a single sight in sport more predictable than Scotland finding an ever-more ingenious way of not scoring a try?

Scotland dominated large spells of Saturday’s Calcutta Cup match at Murrayfield yet, faced with a reasonably competent defensive display from England, they simply could not turn it into points on the board.  They could not even get penalties as England suddenly seemed to be a team on speaking terms with self-discipline.

Scotland have not scored a try in four Test matches, two of which were against Georgia and Argentina.  At Murrayfield, they went left and dropped the ball.  They went right and dropped the ball.  They went down the middle and dropped the ball.  For dropping the ball is what the Scotland rugby team do; at Murrayfield, it is almost endemic.

When they weren’t dropping the ball, they were giving away penalties inside the England 22, or turning over possession through being outnumbered in a ruck, or failing to find touch from a penalty.  Dan Parks, the starting Scotland fly-half, had one of those games that commentators are wont do describe as ‘not one for the scrapbook’.  His kicking game was poor.

At the start of the second half, one Parks kick did at least set up a try.  For England.  Charlie Hodgson’s charge-down score summed up the grotesque lack of finesse that the game suffered from start to finish.  Hodgson was excellent, as was England’s second-rower Moritz Botha.  That they stood out merely for looking like international footballers is the perfect condemnation of a dreadful match.

The following day, at Lansdowne Road, Ireland and Wales appeared to be playing a completely different sport.  Their encounter was everything you could ask of a sporting contest: high quality, high scoring and dramatic right to the end.

George North, superficially human, clattered through massed Irish defenders to set up the first try of the match for Jonathan Davies II, and clattered through massed Irish defenders to score the last.  The lead, by the end, had changed hands four times.

The main talking point was the referee, as indeed it usually in high profile rugby Tests.  It was in the World Cup semi final, when Sam Warburton was sent off for a clumsy but, ultimately, non-dangerous ‘tip tackle’; in the Final, when local desperation to see New Zealand crowned world champions evidently invaded the soul of Craig Joubert, the South African whose inept officiating cost France the tournament; and at Murrayfield, where replacement fly-half Greig Laidlaw was denied a try by the Television Match Official.

Wales lock Bradley Davies’ tackle on Donnacha Ryan was, without question, a much worse offense than Warburton’s in Auckland.  In the words of the touch judge Dave Pearson, he ‘picked him up, turned him upside down and dropped him on his head’; the very definition of a spear tackle.  So why only a yellow card was recommended, and why referee Wayne Barnes failed to instantly enquire as to Dave Pearson mental wellbeing and show a red card, only they know.  To make matters worse for Ireland, they lost the game to a borderline penalty, when Stephen Ferris clumsily but safely mis-tackled Ian Evans.  Ferris, ludicrously, was sin-binned for the remaining seconds of the match.

Yet all of this merely added to the excitement.  Scotland v England was a great advert for the 6 Nations; immersive, tense and committed.  This, though, was the great advert for rugby union football.  Wales showed class to add to the quality of character that, on its own, was enough for England to achieve their victory.  Against Ireland, Wales needed something extra.  So will England.

England must strip captaincy of unwarranted prestige

"You know, Lewis, Morse is a bloody good copper.  But sometimes he's more trouble that he's worth."  Chief Supt. Strange, 'Masonic Mysteries'

May we, before we start, agree on one thing?  I do not know whether John Terry is guilty of racially abusing Anton Ferdinand, or he was merely rebutting an accusation made by the QPR defender.  Nor do you.  Nor do the Football Association.  Nor even – even! – Simon Barnes, Oliver Kay, James Lawson or the rest of the Fleet Street sport ensemble.

The following is a summation of the press release that, in a more level-headed world, the Football Association ought to have issued upon learning that John Terry’s trial would not take place until a week after the end of the European Championship:

“The Football Association are disappointed that the issue concerning John Terry and Anton Ferdinand will not be settled until after the Euro 2012 tournament.  However, we accept the primacy of the British justice system and will respond accordingly.

In appreciation of the seriousness of the allegations made against Mr Terry, and in accordance with our strong stance against racism, in all of its forms, in the game, we have informed Mr Terry that, should he be convicted, he will not be selected to play for England again.

However, we understand that Mr Terry denies the charges in the strongest possible terms and until such a time as the case may be judged, the principle of ‘innocent until proven guilty’ must apply and Mr Terry will remain as captain of the England team.

In response to suggestions that Mr Terry’s presence in the England dressing room may produce a ‘toxic’ atmosphere, we remind all players and supporters that the matter is sub judice and Mr Terry is entitled to the benefit of the doubt unless/until he is convicted.  All England players should behave in a professional manner and avoid assuming rôles of judge or jurer that are not theirs to assume.  No further comment on this issue will be made by anybody connected with the England team until the end of Mr Terry’s trial and questions from the media relating to this issue will not be welcomed.”

In the absence of such sound reason, we are left to ponder, once again, who the England captain should be.  Worryingly, suitable candidates do not abound.  Rio Ferdinand is rarely fit and, with Terry set to remain England’s principal central defender, may regret wasting a good opportunity to keep quiet should Terry be acquitted.

The FA, though, have an opportunity of their own; specifically, not to appoint anybody as full time England captain.  The rôle, which in football is purely ceremonial, should be awarded on a match-by-match basis.  This is not to say there is a lack of suitable candidates but to argue that a change in culture must be induced in English football.

The Roy-of-the-Rovers culture, that of individual hero-worship, has dominated English football for longer than your humble servant has been alive.  As long ago as 1982, we obsessed over the fitness of Kevin Keegan and Trevor Brooking, ignoring the fact that England had other players who were indeed good enough to beat France 3-1 in their first match in Bilbao.

Since then, intolerable pressure has been placed on certain players to be the man who brings the trophy home for England: Paul Gascoigne in 1996, Michael Owen in 1998, David Beckham in 2002, Wayne Rooney since Euro 2004.  Already, we are seeing disproportionate attention given to the state of Jack Wilshere’s health, even though it is only February.

Capello, who for two pins would now award the captaincy on a match-by-match basis, must be at his wits end.  Yet the whole situation would have been avoided had certain players respected the court case and not made inferred assumptions of Terry’s guilt before a single witness has been called.  There is no reason for a dressing room split and Capello should not be blamed for the fact that some players have manufactured one.

Terry is now left in a situation where, for his own sanity as much as anything else, he ought to retire from international football.  Terry has been one of Chelsea's best players this season and remains the best centre-back available to Capello.  Yet has it all become more trouble that it's worth, for team or player?  Should Terry be found guilty, it is his own fault; but if he is acquitted, how could he have any faith in the FA or those of his senior international colleagues who have already conducted the trial in their own heads?

The Myth of the Africa Cup of Nations

You, like me, are probably looking forward to a top notch international football championship.  You, like me, are probably eagerly anticipating excellent football, lively atmospheres and wall-to-wall television coverage.  Alas, I speak of Euro 2012, coming in June, not of the Africa Cup of Nations, which begins on Saturday when Equatorial Guinea take on Libya, live on British EuroSport.

I say Equatorial Guinea.  What I actually mean is a bunch of mercenaries masquerading as a national football team for which many have only the most spurious claim to be entitled to play.  The Confederation of African Football (CAF) have for years turned a blind eye to eligibility issues.  Perhaps we should hope that Equatorial Guinea do well, leading to protests from opponents which may finally force CAF to act.

The Equatoguineans, such as they are, are only in the tournament because the tournament is in Equatorial Guinea, who co-host with Gabon.  At least Gabon have a halfway competent side.

Equatorial Guinea should have no business hosting the championship.  Though the richest country in continental Africa, its wealth is distributed with grotesque iniquity; 70% of the population live under the UN Poverty Threshold of $2 per day.  It is also listed by Freedom House as having one of the worst national human rights records in the world.

Usually around this time, the BBC wheel out a pundit – often Mark Bright – to talk about the ‘colour and vibrancy’ of the tournament.  Codswallop.  If you want colour and atmosphere at an international tournament, get hold of a DVD of the Holland-Italy match in Bern at Euro 2008.  If you want matches played in mostly empty stadia unless the home team are playing, with irritating bands playing continuously regardless of what happens on the pitch – they don’t even stop for a goal – and barely interested fans wandering idly into the stadium twenty minutes after kick-off, watch the Cup of Nations.

It is often little better on the pitch.  Some tournaments at least make up with drama what they lack in quality: the 2008 tournament in Ghana averaged well over three goals per match; the 2010 semi final between Egypt and Algeria was unforgettable, albeit for mostly the wrong reasons.

But generally it is thin gruel.  The last three Finals, and four of the last five, have been dismal.  The first tournament I followed in depth, in Mali in 2002, was wretched: barely 1.5 goals per game; atrocious pitches, often dangerously so; and lamentable football by most teams.

In Angola two years ago, the tournament started with a bang and the best match of 2010.  In the 74th minute, a Manucho penalty put the hosts 4-0 up over Mali in a delirious Estádio 11 de Novembro in Luanda.  A Seydou Keita goal seemed to be only a consolation but Mali scored again in the 88th minute, then in the 93rd and finally equalized in the 94th.  It was surely the most extraordinary opening match to any major international football tournament in history.

That, though, was a false dawn.  Take Jonathan Wilson’s word for it: “The football in Angola two years ago was rubbish.”  Overshadowed by the terrorist on the Togo team bus – evidence that this was yet another tournament misguidedly taken to an inappropriate country – the football did little to warm the blood.  Algeria and the hosts almost certainly conspired to draw 0-0 in their final group fixture, thus guaranteeing progress for both at the expense of the more adventurous but utterly incohesive Malians.

The refereeing was weak and conspired to help cynical teams.  The attendances  for matches not involving Angola were pitiful, yet our intelligence was insulted by preposterously inflated ‘official’ crowd figures which bring to mind a Carling Cup tie at the Emirates Stadium.

But this is a tournament which comes with complimentary codswallop by the bucket load.  Wilson also wrote, in a recent Guardian article, of the editor of another organ rejecting a column for being ‘too negative’ about the tournament.

The appeal of the tournament remains that it is a fascination.  But it was a fascination twenty years ago; that is not progress.  Yet the tournament is bizarrely covered much more by the BBC than the significantly superior Copa América or even the Asian Cup, and that is even after they have lost the rights to ITV.

Africa has been overtaken by Asia as the continent most likely to be the third, after South America and Europe, to produce a World Cup winning nation, or even Finalist.  Japan, or even South Korea, would probably walk this tournament.  That is its greatest condemnation.

Europa League steps out from the shadows

Is it right and proper that Manchester United and Manchester City are obliged to play football matches in the most obscure, recession-battered, dreary boondocks of Europe?

But enough of their home fixtures in the Premier League.  The Europa League draw last Friday produced some glamorous fixtures in the last 32 of the tournament.  Manchester United face Ajax in a clash-of-the-titans tie destined to have Channel 5 executives drooling.

City, meanwhile, will play the holders Porto in another high-profile tie.  Roberto Mancini’s side are likely to take the tournament more seriously than their neighbours; they are still at the stage where they need to win as many trophies as they can to legitimize their status as one of the continent’s major clubs.  Besides, City have greater squad depth than just about any club in the world, so can afford to rotate their side.

It all adds up to an more-than-usually appetizing round of fixtures.  Stoke City v Valencia looks good, too.  As long as you ignore Stoke.

The competition has its detractors and it is not hard to see why.  With the Champions League ever increasing in profile and importance, the other UEFA club competition appears increasingly tacked-on.  Tottenham Hotspur could hardly disguise their desire to be knocked out – though Harry Redknapp’s joyless dismissal of perhaps the club’s best chance of a trophy this season is hardly worthy of praise – and fielded scratch sides in most matches.

The tournament feels bloated, with too many teams, too many qualifying rounds – Fulham’s campaign began in late June, for heaven’s sake – and little glamour.  Thursday night football also has an inbuilt smell of artifice about it.

Perhaps the best thing to do would be for UEFA to bring back the much missed Cup Winners’ Cup.  The confederation would have an extra Final, surely a better occasion than the Super Cup, and an extra high-profile night for television viewers around the globe.

The problem is the wretched group stage.  Group stages work in international tournaments because teams only play each other once; every match assumes a massive importance.  Play on a home-and-away basis, however, and clubs begin to feel they can coast.  There have been few gripping nights for the English clubs in the Champions League group stages in recent seasons, until their poor performances this time around left Chelsea, Manchester United and Manchester City all needing a result on Matchday 6.

The group stages, though, guarantee teams a minimum of six matchdays, meaning more revenue from both attendances and television rights.  Another problem for UEFA is the end of communism; not in the political sense, but in the fact that what used to be the USSR is now myriad nations, each with their own domestic league and collection of qualifying teams.  The same applies to post-break-up Yugoslavia.

So we must continue to rely on the knock-out stages for real drama.  Either that or hope that the English sides continue to be mediocre in Europe.  This season’s performances have often been dismal, with only Arsenal and Stoke City sealing progress with a game to spare and only Chelsea winning through in the final round of group games.  In football as in real life, the British are having trouble in Europe.

So let’s enjoy the knock-out stages for what they are; genuine, competitive football.  Matches aren’t important simply because they are in a particularly high-profile tournament; they are important when they matter.

Euro 2012 a big draw in more ways than one

Perhaps all draws should be like this.  Maybe all we need to liven up the NCEL League Cup draw is Zinedine Zidane and Marco van Basten drawing out balls between monumentally pointless interludes pertaining to local culture.  “Lincoln Moorlands Railway… will play… Glasshoughton Welfare.  Now, here’s the Crigglestone Colliery Band playing ‘Our Lass Is A Yorkshire Lass’.”

Draws are rather like opening ceremonies; pompous, overblown and, in more ways than one, drawn out.  Perhaps I’ve become cynical but once you’ve seen one African woman in a massive headdress surrounded by schoolchildren re-enacting the dawn of time, you’ve seen them all.

Once the interminable faffery had subsided, we were treated to something dimly resembling the Euro 2012 draw.  Time taken in total: almost an hour.  Rudimentary experiments in your humble author’s study involving an ice-cream tub and some scissors have proven beyond doubt that the whole thing can be done in just under four minutes.

After a fashion, the draw threw up some mouth-watering group stage clashes; though, in reality, it was always going to.  The thing about the Euros is that good sides are crammed together more densely than in a World Cup and the major footballing nations are not all in the same pot of seeds.

So we have Germany v Portugal, Spain v Italy, France v England and Holland v Germany, all in the first six days of the championship.  By comparison, the highlight of the opening six days of the World Cup in 2010 was probably Uruguay v France.

The Euros have, for some time, been considered the highest quality tournament in football, and quite possibly all sport.  The last three tournaments have been of a consistently high quality, whereas the last three World Cups have been relatively disappointing (though not without drama).

The tournament throws up more of the international game’s major rivalries, which gives the early stages of the competition an intensity that the World Cup group stages sometimes lack.  Goalscoring rates, too, have been consistently higher in the Euros than the World Cups of the twenty-first century.

The Euro 2012 draw was helped by the fact that two lesser sides, co-hosts Poland and Ukraine, were automatically seeded, pushing Germany and Italy down into Pot 2.  Group A will be a curiosity, with arguably the worst team from each of the four seeding pots drawn together.  Yet what treats lie elsewhere.

For their part, England are in a relatively manageable Group D, in which they will face France, Sweden and finally Ukraine.  Their cause was helped this week by UEFA’s sensible decision to finally apply the laws of precedent to Wayne Rooney’s absurdly harsh three-match ban, with the Manchester United forward now able to play in the last group game against the co-hosts in Donetsk.

Yet every team at the Euros will be competitive.  In the main, the right fourteen teams came through the qualifying competition, with Turkey and Serbia the biggest absentees.  This is not bad news for England, who have no games against somebody like Algeria, and are in no danger of underestimating the task ahead of them.  England simply weren’t up for the game in Cape Town; there is little danger of complacency next summer.