Everybody hates the idea of match-fixing in football. Of course we do. It’s cheating, right? Incompatible with the purest notion of sport being about two opposing forces straining every sinew to win a fair fight.
Then how is a manager planning to get a player deliberately booked any different? There was widespread dismay at Europol’s recent match-fixing revelations but mostly indifference to Andre Villas-Boas’s claim he would have instructed Gareth Bale to pick up a yellow card against Inter Milan last week had he not already done so.
On a purely cynical level, it makes complete sense. Bale was one yellow card from suspension, Tottenham were leading 3-0 and the Welshman could do with a rest. It could easily be deemed clever to manipulate the disciplinary system in this way, leaving their star man “clean”, as the Portuguese put it, for the Europa League quarter-finals.
Yet there is something decidedly dirty about it. It is morally and ethically reprehensible. To dismiss it as a one-off would be to ignore a growing trend in football that is certainly not restricted to Spurs.
In November 2011, John Terry was booked in the 90th minute of a game Chelsea were leading 3-0 for time-wasting over a throw-in. Once he received the yellow card — his fifth of the season, thereby ruling him out of a Carling Cup match against Liverpool he would have missed anyway — he tossed the ball to Juan Mata and ran back to the halfway line.
Villas-Boas oversaw that from the dugout too but the then Chelsea manager denied any foul play (so to speak).
No punishment was issued but that has not always been the case. Real Madrid and Jose Mourinho were fined £87,000 and £26,000 respectively for improper conduct (after a successful appeal lowered the initial amounts) after Sergio Ramos and Xabi Alonso both picked up second yellow cards to ensure their one-game ban was served in a Champions League dead rubber in 2010. In addition, Mourinho had a one-game touchline suspension and four players were also fined.
It would be easy to dismiss these as isolated incidents of clandestine behaviour adopted by savvy managers looking for any angle to gain an advantage. Given the characters of Villas-Boas and Mourinho, that may well be true in their case but that does not mean others will not use similar means as a form of corruption.
Ex-Premier League referee Steve Bennett was quoted by the News of the World in 2009 claiming that players got booked to miss certain away games or spend time with their families over Christmas.
Speaking about an unnamed player, Bennett said: “He came into the dressing room, on my mother’s life, and said ‘I need one more yellow card’.
“So I gave him a yellow card and he said, ‘No, no, no. On the pitch. It’s up to you.’ And they go straight through a bloke, to get a yellow card so that they don’t have to play over Christmas.
“If they [the fans] knew that, they’d be absolutely gutted, trust me.”
So what can be done? It is, of course, difficult to prove conclusively that a player has deliberately committed an offence but not impossible and, as with most issues in football, the solution is sterner punishments.
Match officials can rarely be blamed. As arbiters of the Laws of the Game, they must apply them, so action has to be retrospective.
FIFA went somewhere near far enough last year when punishing the Uzbekistan Football Federation after their national team picked up five yellow cards for time-wasting in the final 20 minutes of a World Cup qualifier against Tajikstan.
Shavkatjon Mulladjanov, Sanjar Tursunov, Islom Tuhtahujaev, Server Djeparov and Vagiz Galiulin all wanted to serve a suspension in a dead rubber and thereby be eligible for the next key match. FIFA increased the one-match ban to two games to ensure they missed the match they had intended to play in.
Well done, FIFA (there’s a rarely used sentence). Of course, this sanction was unfavourably complemented with a paltry fine of £13,000 for the Federation and £2,000 for each player but they rarely get it totally right.
The Football Association must pay greater attention to such incidents to avoid this specific form of corruption spreading throughout the game. David Beckham admitted when England captain in 2004 to deliberately getting booked against Wales to miss a qualifier in Azerbaijan because he knew he had already broken a rib earlier in the match and would therefore not play anyway.
Despite publicly admitting it, the FA decided he had not brought the game into disrepute. On the grounds of “insufficient evidence”.
If fans cannot be certain that a tackle they witness in a game is a genuine attempt to win the ball or work the system, how is that not bringing the game into disrepute?
http://www.standard.co.uk/sport/spo...-trick-should-be-brought-to-book-8532046.html
