Double Standards let Stevie Godiver off the hook
BySince no one (I’ve tried finding someone who does) is going to talk about this issue, I’ve decided to be a one man crusader.
At the beginning of the season, Wenger was royally slated for defending Eduardo Da Silva from a media witch hunt that baffled the footballing establishment around the world. Except in England (and Scotland for that matter), everyone else around the world pretty much wondered what the hell the furore was about Eduardo ‘diving’. If the referee thought for any reason that he was conned, it was a straight yellow card offence and life would move on.
Eduardo experienced the worst nightmare any player would want from the English media witch hunt that followed. Guillame Balague, a famous Spanish and European football pundit even dared to tell his English colleagues to move from the caveman Neolithic age and take football for what it is now.
Arsenal to its credit, didn’t back down at all and challenged UEFA who had no option but to back down – a move that had English journalists and pundits spitting fire and brimstone all over the air waves and on news columns. Eduardo and Arsene Wenger were pretty much labelled the footballing Anti-Christs’ for their blatant cheating. We were told that cheating had no place in English football and all these foreigners better leave their ’dirty’ tricks out there because we don’t do that sort of thing in England.
The English media portrayed the English game as being whiter than white with their superstars St. Terry and St. Rooney committing the monumental cardinal sin by standing in front of a camera and professing to the world that ”we English lads are ‘onest and we don’t do that sort of cheating”. This despite the form that various prominent England players had for cheating including Rooney himself.
I can accept that Eduardo dived, whatever his motive was. We can’t get into his head, but he has the right to make that decision based on how he sees the game. If he transgressed, it’s no more than a yellow card. However, I found the media demonization of Eduardo so painful because it unfairly and arbitrarily targeted him while many others in the game continued with the same crime against association football (for that was what it was being portrayed as).
Fast forward to the World cup qualifiers, and we have Arsenal and Arsene Wenger being blamed (by the English and not the Irish media mind you) for Ireland being kicked out of the World cup – notwithstanding the fact that Ireland benefitted from an equally deplorable crime against association football when they got past Georgia in February. Where were the cries for Ireland to be punished then?…but I digress.
It was almost second nature to blame Arsenal for Thierry Henry’s transgressions despite the fact that he was a Barcelona player and had been for over 2 seasons. My take is that I don’t even blame Henry for doing an instinctive thing that any player in the world would have done under the same circumstances. Again, if caught, this was only a yellow card offense and nothing more. It’s the media witch hunt that follows that eternally pisses me off.
So when I scan the news wires for the last 48 hours looking for any acknowledgement of the blatant cheating that Steven ‘Godiver’ Gerrard did by shamelessly diving in the game against Blackburn to try and win a penalty, and find none – you can understand why the double standards irk the hell out of me. For one, Gerrard has form against Sheffield Utd and against Standard Liege just to mention a few.
Career journalists like Adrian Durham even had the audacity to suggest that because Gerrard never appealed the penalty, he wasn’t a diver and he had slipped because of the wet weather yada yada yada. Durham even went as far as saying that if Gerrard or any other England player dived in the World cup and got a result – he’d take it.
This is the same journalist who for weeks on end led the crusade and witch hunt against Eduardo for cheating. There are many others – most of who could only muster a “Gerrard was trying to be clever there to win a penalty” – yet it is so obvious that the Liverpool captain tried to gain advantage by deceiving the referee – and was outrightly embarrassed, he was too ashamed to even claim anything.
In late January, I wrote about Steven Gerard’s trial which in my view was a complete white wash simply because of who Gerrard is. If it was anyone else on the street who admitted the offence and the police had CCTV to go with the admission – they’d be serving a jail term right now. The notion of self defence put forward in the case is laughable at best and insulting at worst.
But at least we now know how two faced and biased the English Sports media are.
Tue 13th September 2011; 19:45, Dortmund
Full marks for the expose Darius.
Steven Gerrard, let’s remember, is a repeat offender.
It is amusing to see this running, entirely hypocritical, “battle” between “English” and “European” football:
England, it seems, hates the “immorality” of the European approach; and Europe, it seems, detests the English leagues’ wealth.
This ofcourse leads to all sorts of absurdities from, on the one hand, the English press, and, on the other, from Michel Platini, Sepp Blatter, and Co.
Arsenal, I fancy, are villains either way: We’re not “English” enough for the local press (Please don’t bother pointing out the youngsters under development); We’re detestably English to the continentals.
Saloner. True true.
Arsenal most definitely isn’t “English” enough this side of the pond, and from the European side – we’re part and parcel of the reviled English footballing establishement. You can’t win – can you?
When it gets to the stage where producers and programming directors don’t cite commentators for outright xenophobic comments – then you wonder how far into this cesspit we are in.
I have on several occasions heard current players and ex-players indulging in punditry (let’s face it – some of them have no clue about journalistic integrity) publicly showing their disdain for what they call “the cheating that foreigners have brought into the ever so honest English game”.
Like so much else that is both obvious and apparent to all except the terminally stupid, disgracefully unprofessional or those possessing an agenda of their own, your clear exposition of the hypocrisy in the game is spot on.
Stevie ‘Me’ is a disgrace. His dallying with the chavs for two years, his repeat cheating and his criminal behaviour would have any true fans, never mind the FA and the ‘media’ holding their noses every time that he stepped onto a football pitch. Rooney really isn’t much better. They head a cast of many more that can do little wrong.
I really worry about where the game is going. How far are we from a situation where football can be compared the sordid sham that is ‘Wrestling’ as a sport. The authorities do have to take a long hard look at where they seem to be content to take us. Maybe it doesn’t matter too much if some players have their careers destroyed or one or two teams are cheated out of a title or two.
However, if the deterioration in the integrity of any sport is allowed to continue long enough then it becomes unwatchable and pointless. Neither worth pursueing as a means of excellence or as a spectator event.
We are heading that way. It is a shame and disgrace.
Saloner, Darius & C’bob: You are all men after my own heart. It pleases me no end to find, day-in-day-out, that Some Arsenal fans are amongst the most sensible men in this planet.
Even though I am British, I can unequivocally say that I neither English, Welsh, Scotish or Irish. Even so, it hurts me no end when I see all the corrupt practices and so evident Double Standards that behoves our Nation (our British society). For we cannot divorce football from the rest of our society. Unlike in ‘Animal Farm’ by George Orwell, we have changed the slogan “Two legs bad, Four legs good” to ‘All things foreign bad, all things British, especially English, good’.
I am afraid this stance is not going to stand us in good stead with the rest of Europe, much less the rest of the world. We will, in the end, be poorer for it. Unfortunately, the avenues for taking corrective measures are themselves too corrupt to be any more effective than a failed path. Piteous as it may seem, we the few, like all you my friends, must constitute the lone voices in the widerness. Cheers my friends!!!
Darius – Just saw your excellent blog. Like you, I am astounded by the rank stench of hypocrisy not only the media, but even among many Arsenal bloggers, who refuse to take on the English divers like Gerrard but who themselves took Eduardo to the woodshed or were mealy mouth in his defence. Unlike you, I refuse to concede for one minute that Eduardo dived; Boruc went after his legs and he had the right to take evasive action and go down. The fact that Boruc did not go all the way does not void his intent and by the rules intent is sufficient for a penalty. Furthermore, video evidence presented by Arsenal, but given little prominence in the media, showed Boruc made contact on Eduardo’s trailing leg enough for him to fall.
Like Consols, I am concerned by the intgerity of the sport. Professional wrestling is poster boy for crass deception but I lost all respect for most American professional sports by the constant rule-changes designed to dumb down the game to cater for casual viewer who is only interested in the stats of the “franchise player” and the newest tv ads during time-outs and the mandatory quarter and half-time breaks. Years ago I lost interest in English football because of the dumbing monotony of route 1 football. My love for the game was reignited by Arsene Wenger and the integerity he has restored to English football by his devotion to the beautiful game. I hope that through fans like you and Consols, in and outside England, we can prevail over the hypocrites, the money-men, the media and their muriad henchmen who are doing so much to destroy the game.
Yep, totally agree with you here Darius. The English media are disgraceful at best. English players are usually untouchable and saintly in their eyes. Rooney dives, Gerrard dives, and these two players always say they don’t dive…
Arsenal are always targeted by the English media because of their lack of “English-ness”, and they will always be under a French boss. The Eduardo incident is one of the best examples of that. You can feel that the media were really waiting to pounce on Arsenal, and when they got the chance, they took it gladly. When Rooney dived against Arsenal within weeks of that incident, not even a word of it was whispered in the press. So yes, there are clear double-standards in the media, the English one in particular, and it is utterly disgusting to anyone who spots it while the majority just read it blindly and get swayed by their comments.
But does anyone remember how the media led a similar witch-hunt against Ronaldo which lasted for years on end (until he finally left the EPL for good) after his winking at the 06 World Cup? Instead of their saintly English bulldog being blamed for being hot-headed, they conveniently blame the non-English for winking. They even go so far as to distort facts in match reports involving Ronaldo to frame him as a “wussy” (for lack of a better word), with the most prominent one being strangled by Emanuel Pogatetz during a corner, while the media reported it as Ronaldo going down too easily in the box.
If we see it as the English media wanting more Englishmen in their league by chasing away the foreigners (including foreign coaches like Wenger), then this all makes sense I guess? But by doing so, they are losing the people who make the EPL interesting to watch. Like shotta-gunna said, I also believe that Wenger’s philosophy to beautiful football is good for the EPl as a whole, and to chase people like him away to let English “talents” take his place would be a big shame and disgrace indeed.
[...] was only last week that we were discussing the double standards in English sports journalism as those who pretended to be self righteous and jumped on the ’we must expose the cheats’ [...]