Aaah, Zizou!

After that Final, I couldn't help posting on Rob Smyth's blog again...

Aaah, Zizou! Zizou! How could you do this to me? And after we rubbed shoulders, too, on that flight from Milan to Paris, back in the autumn of 1998, as you basked in the glow of what we now know was your greatest triumph! OK, you were taking an irritatingly long time putting your expensive leather jacket in the overhead locker in First Class, and I was pushing past to reach Economy, but I felt we were in some sense comrades, literally fellow-travellers…

But, after we overcome the shock of the image that will always be associated with Germany 2006, who will be judged the real villain of the piece? Whose behaviour and attitudes will be examined most forensically, whose future will be blighted the most by that one moment in Berlin? Materazzi – the Italian Cristiano Ronaldo – is the one who will ultimately hang his head in shame.

What an image, though! We can imagine how the anger erupted, flowing round the mental blocks that restrained it. You merely clenched your fists, but did not strike with them. And in that instant you wanted to smash that face. Again the censor inside your head did not permit the action. But the impulse could not be stopped entirely. What a catharsis that head-butt must have been. Until a moment later you realised what you had done…

Stop! What’s happening? The formal justice of this game, this sophisticated expression of our culture, has punished only Zidane. It may even – by referring to video evidence – have broken its own rules to do so. Yet Materazzi, like Ronaldo, will be condemned by a more natural, popular system of justice. There is a disconnect, a gaping chasm, between the procedures of the game and the form of policing its supposed owners, the fans, want to see. Shouldn’t the early shower welcome the provocateur, and not just his victim? It’s not as if, with the all-seeing eye of the camera, we have no means of detecting the crime.

I remember two incidents watching Southampton as a small boy in the 1970s. A few minutes before the end of the first game of one season, Mike Summerbee, playing for Manchester City, had had enough. He felled the notoriously robust Southampton defender Denis Hollywood with what I fondly remember as a superbly executed right uppercut. Hollywood was still on the turf receiving treatment when Summerbee finished his early bath. I remember the fans leaving the ground chuckling that Summerbee wasn’t yet ready to end his summer holiday. He wanted another week off, for that was the extent of the punishment he was likely to receive. No one condemned the City forward. The fans knew their Denis the Menace, and knew natural justice had been served.

On another occasion, Ron Davies, Southampton’s lilywhite Welsh international centre-forward, received his first ever booking. When he snapped he lashed out like a donkey at Chelsea’s Ron “Chopper” Harris. The referee knew Davies was reacting to an hour of physical abuse, and didn’t send him off. When “Chopper” eventually returned to the pitch (Chelsea had already used the one substitute they were permitted), his leg was bandaged so heavily it looked like it was in plaster. He was reduced to hobbling around in the centre-circle. How we laughed!

Yet how things have changed! Now, any retaliation, however ineffectual – think Beckham in 1998 – incurs draconian punishment. Although Materazzi’s bruised ribs, like Carvalho’s tackled tackle, have surely suffered no lasting damage, Zidane’s reputation is supposedly destroyed. Yet the behaviour that provokes retaliation, the sneaky fouls, the nipple-tweaking, the deeply wounding comments, all this simply goes unpunished! Does this reflect the values of the 21st century? Or is the policing of the game failing?

Let’s answer the question simply: the referee is the authority figure, the parent on the pitch. And he acts like a parent who is too easily deceived. What sort of children are raised by parents who punish only the child they see striking another? Continually ignoring any possible causes of retaliation, they raise self-centred sneaks and bullies. In other words, exactly what modern football is creating. A wise parent would look at the whole picture.

We love the drama, but those of us who love football more want to see a different spirit reflected in the game, and are losing patience with those who control the sport. The game no longer embodies the values of the common man. Instead, the policing of the game puts a desire to protect the authority of its administrators above popular demands for more objectivity. They try to screw down the lid ever tighter on the pressure-cooker inside the head of the Zidane, the Rooney, the Beckham. Yet they let the pressure rise ever higher, until, time after time, with all the certainty of the laws of physics, a valve inevitably gives way.