THE BITTER disappointment on Wednesday night was all the greater because the Irish football team had risen to the occasion like never before. The match aftermath has seen an uncontrollable rage across the airwaves and internet that suggests Ireland has lost all sense of proportion, but recall Bill Shankly’s joking insistence that while “some people think football is a matter of life and death ... I can assure them it is much more serious than that”. Thierry Henry has dishonoured himself. Football may be just a game but it reverbates in peoples’ ordinary lives throughout the world.
That is not to say that an undoubted injustice cannot be righted. Football’s world governing body (Fifa) prides itself on its “ fair play” code which, if it is to mean anything, it has a duty to uphold to protect the game and itself from the taint of dishonour. Article 1 says that “Winning is without value if victory has been achieved unfairly or dishonestly . . . And games are pointless unless played fairly.” Sepp Blatter should recall the odium directed at him at the Champions League final if he fails to uphold his own code.
Faced with the irrefutable evidence of foul play, not least the candid admission by Henry that he handled the ball, Fifa should order a replay. As the Football Association of Ireland has argued, there is a strong precedent: in 2005, Fifa invalidated the result of a World Cup qualification match between Uzbekistan and Bahrain on the basis of a technical error by the match referee.
The fiasco also raises important other issues for the world body. There can be no argument for not now embracing technology in matches where so much is at stake. Fifa should also roll out rules, already being trailed in Germany, that would place the onus on players to admit to cheating when questioned by referees, under pain of subsequent penalties should TV prove they have lied. Indeed, Ireland manager Giovanni Trapattoni generously admitted yesterday that if Henry had been asked at the time by the referee if he had handled the ball the player would probably have admitted it.
On the other hand, the widespread willingness to accept that Henry was perhaps not morally culpable for his silence, and to blame the referee, suggests a broader acceptance than might be acknowledged of the extent to which the “professional foul” is part and parcel of the modern game. That we should still remember the time in 1997 when Liverpool’s Robbie Fowler, most honourably, tried to turn down a penalty awarded to him, only serves to point out how much of an oddity such conduct reflects these days.