I have just been watching the FA Cup Final and, bless them,
Arsenal beat Aston Villa 4-0 with a devastating display, a first half goal by
Theo Walcott followed by three in the second half from Alexis Sanchez, Per
Mertesacker and Olivier Giroud. Villa played below their best and never posed
much danger. This is a 6th Cup triumph for Arsenal’s master-mind and
manager Arsène Wenger capping a most distinguished career. Well played The
Gunners!
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| Alexis Sanchez scores a peach of a goal to make it 2-0 |
I am a moderately interested armchair TV spectator of sport
but had no discernible sporting talent in my vigorous youth, never winning even
a school cap where I rose merely to the gallant 2nd rugby XV and the
much less gallant 3rd cricket XI. I was however a whizz at billiards
and shove-ha’penny!
If I were a serious contemplative type, (thankfully I am
not), I would worry about the integrity of sport in general and football in
particular. I doubt if the FA Cup Final itself was “fixed” but it cannot be
denied that The Beautiful Game’s
image has been recently besmirched by the accusations levelled against the
sport’s senior ruling body FIFA, presided over by the 79-year-old Swiss Sepp
Blatter. Sepp himself is no doubt as pure as the driven snow, but he may have
been a tiny bit negligent and lacking in curiosity about large sums floating
around senior figures at FIFA. Certainly the US Department of Justice and the
FBI have been galvanised into action, charging 6 FIFA officials and 8 others
with corruption. We may well learn more
as the weeks pass.
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| 79-year-old Sepp Blatter and 51-year-old Linda Barras |
Sepp himself brushed off this scandal and was re-elected
President, although much Press comment was derisive. He seems calm enough and
has an enviable line in girlfriends, so he must have hidden qualities. There
have been rumours about odd goings-on at FIFA for years but all is idle gossip
until something is proven in court.
Football has long had a bad reputation. Match-fixing had to
be stamped out in the 1930s and now with vast salaries for players, eager to
capitalise on their relatively short playing careers and advised by a motley
crew of agents, the temptations are huge. Key people like managers and referees
are often the target for bribes – it was famously said of talented Brian Clough
that “he liked a bung” and even manager George Graham of Arsenal in 1995 was
dismissed for accepting £400,000 from a Norwegian agent. Professional football
players, often tattooed rough-necks, are not the types to respond to
Establishment pleas to “play a straight bat to life” and the ethics of players
in Continental Europe, Africa and South America hardly bear thinking about.
Football is by no means the only sport tainted by corruption
and the taint goes back many centuries. Cheating at the Ancient Greek Olympics
was rampant and offenders had in penance to pay for the erection of a new
statue to the gods – hence the multitude of statues. Mind you, athletes
competed in the nude, so they could not hide their bribes up their sleeves,
though of course where there’s a will there’s a way. Horse racing is said to be
“the sport of kings” but doped animals, bent jockeys and blind stewards are
certainly not unknown. Cycling, greyhound racing and athletics have been beset
by “performance-enhancing substances” and even the tranquil world of cricket
has been rocked by scandals of match-fixing and spot-betting, notably seeing
the dismissal of Hansie Cronje, captain of South Africa, and the imprisonment
of 3 Pakistani players including captain Salman Butt. At the bottom of these
scandals usually lurks a fetid group of bookies, grown powerful by the
globalisation of gambling and the lure of easy winnings. Energetic and watchful
regulation is necessary in every sport.
Yet I will continue to watch golf, football and 6-Nations
rugby as McIlroy, Arsenal and Scotland (fitfully) strive to delight. I will
dismiss from my mind thoughts of Swiss graft, or Emirates match- fixing
influencing the results of my favoured sports. As Orson Welles in the role of
Harry Lime observed: “In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five
hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo
clock.” Even in modest Scotland we produced Colin Montgomerie, Dave Mackay and
Gregor Townsend – beat that, Zurich!
SMD
30.5.15
Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2015
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