You can't handle the truth!

The beautiful game is no more. RIP. A strange comment I must admit ahead of what should be a couple of lip smackingly, mouth watering Champions League quarter finals. But give me a second to explain my irreverent comment to you purists and any other poor soul that has stumbled upon my words of wisdom today. Like a once beautiful girl that has let herself go, the beautiful game has gotten to stage where a stand needs to be taken, hard work put in and perhaps she can emerge from these dark times better than ever. The saying goes that beauty is truth and truth, beauty. Well I’m struggling to see the beauty in football through the pack of liars, divers, drunk drivers and gun toting maniacs that are calling themselves professionals in this day and age. Trust, loyalty and accountability are not words associated with much in football nowadays. The leaders of the game are like a bunch of paranoid junkies who have been locked in a room together for a couple days and things are about to get ugly. No one trusts Sepp Blatter or his cronies at FIFA. The FA are at constant loggerheads with everyone, including their former chairman and UEFA has been likened to a dictatorship by Arsene Wenger, amongst others. We need not mention SAFA. I can see now why the long lost cousin of football, William Webb Ellis picked up that ball and ran. He was on to something.

Say what you will about Rugby Union and the “thugs” and “boytjies” that play the game but they seem to have their heads screwed on straight. I can’t ever remember a player verbally abusing a ref or the whole Blue Bulls pack surrounding him for giving a penalty to the opposition. I’ve never heard John Plumtree calling a ref unfit or too weak to make the right decisions. Yes the system has it’s flaws, but those are far outweighed by the pro’s. I have a couple of proposals for those high up and supposedly knowledgeable suits. A couple words of wisdom that will perhaps bring the sparkle back into this game we know and love. Let’s me not ramble, let me get to it. Let’s change up some rules and ruffle some feathers. Starting at square one.

Ask any rube their biggest problem with modern football and diving that is bound to be the first word out of their mouth. It makes the rest of us real footballers look like a bunch of injury prone pampered swine that can’t run 5 yards without snapping our tibia in 2 places. So what’s a fella to do? I propose that for any injury that requires treatment on the field, barring head injuries, the player in question is required to stay off the field for 3 minutes to “recover” from their shattered metatarsal. Players will think twice before rolling on the floor writhing in agony if they knew their team would have to make do with 10 men for a couple minutes. They will however fear the boot that might be lodged in their skull should their team concede while faking an injury to get someone booked. The second aspect I would like to bring in is the citing commissioner. With the numerous television angles available to them, they can tell whether there has been contact in a tackle situation or whether a player hit the deck to win himself a free kick or penalty. If a player is found guilty of a 100% conclusive dive he will be banned for 2 matches without appeal. Simple. Effective. Stop faking and get on with the game.

On the issue of accountability, the FA and any other association for that matter, need to be able to criticise their referees and even demote them for bad performances. I can understand the frustrations of managers and players when the FA refuse to admit that a referee has failed to do his job properly and should be duly punished. Referees are accountable in rugby and cricket, but why not football? These are professionals and if there is a blatant mistake the FA should issue an apology and the referee should be punished accordingly. This will help to ease the tension they currently have with the managers and help to eradicate verbal attacks on the referee’s after matches. Respect works both ways, they need to understand that.

When it comes to citing, although there are inaccuracies in their system, Rugby Union have got it right. I don’t agree with this bullshit of “If the referee sees an incident and writes something in the match report, nothing can be done about it after the match.” If there is proof, nail them. It is another instance of never second guessing the referee. A case and point being both Rafael and Jamie Carragher’s tackles in the derby a couple weeks back. Both got a yellow card in the match for blatant red card offences. They should have been punished after the match and both should have received bans. You cannot expect to rid the game of horror tackles altogether but they cannot remain unpunished just because a referee wrote a side note in a match report.

There is plenty more that can be mentioned, like Didier Drogba’s habit of getting in the referees face over every decision or the every full-back has of throwing in a ball 20 yards away from where it went out but lets start with on major issues and iron out the minor details later. That is all ye know and all ye need to know. Let’s get back to football...

Enjoy the Champions League tonight, let’s hope Tottenham put on a spectacle because we know Jose Mourinho with his negative tactics and multimillion pound team will try grind out a boring 1-0 victory. Long live the beautiful game.

Commodore Vegas

A little cricket hurts alot

Now it’s been some time since I put finger to keyboard and wrote from the heart but they say time heals all wounds. It’s been almost a week since South Africa’s exit from the World Cup, I’ve given myself time to reflect with the assistance of numerous substances and I find myself in a place of relative clarity. The dissections have begun, the CSI’s have scoured the scene and every armchair critic and his parrot have had their say, so why not one more. I’m not here to kick these men while they’re down, I could see the pain etched on their faces in Dhaka. I just want to put out my reasoning, however flawed, behind our seemingly inexplicable demise.

A phrase comes to mind when I think of the match, “Shit happens!”. I feel we had all the ingredients, planning, preparation, make-up of the team but on the day we were beaten by the better side. Now that’s a bitter pill to swallow as favourites, but as an experienced armchair critic I’ve seen my fair share of favourites getting beaten by a better team on the day, but the “C” word has never come up. Imagine calling Man Utd chokers when they lost to Leeds in the FA Cup. Sir Alex would probably come to your house and piss on your cat. So lets start at the beginning, we lost the toss of all tosses. Batting second on low, slow, subcontinental wickets is as hard as it gets. The results in the semi-finals only seem to help make my point. Yes, Sri Lanka won batting second, but it was considerably harder and they would’ve fallen short had New Zealand added 15 or 20 to that score. We bowled and fielded brilliantly to restrict New Zealand and it must be said that Graeme Smiths captaincy was almost flawless whilst out in the field. He used his bowlers well and never let the Black Cap batsmen get into a rhythm.

Now my “Shit happens” comment can be attributed to the first over of our innings when the cricketing gods inexplicably struck out Hashim Amla in one of the most ridiculous dismissals I’ve seen in my cricket watching career. I sensed it then. Deep down, that feeling was there. To lose the best one day batsmen I that manner, that is a game changer. Make no doubt about it, when you bank on your top 4 to do a majority of the scoring and 1 of them gets out in that manner, it has an impact. Couple that with the run-out of AB and we’ve lost the two best batsmen in the world in unnecessary circumstances. We did recover admirably until in 5 overs we contrived to throw the world cup away, but what can be said is New Zealand played their part in assisting us. To say we choked doesn’t give the Black Caps credit where it is due. We were outplayed, plain and simple, lets stop crying about it, stop the enquiries and move on. A new coach, a new captain, a good young side that will play in many more ICC events. It could be worse, we could be Australian...

A little cricket never hurt anybody

So the first ball will be bowled in anger tomorrow in the Cricket World Cup. A sub-continental world cup, what can we expect? One must admit that the subcontinent is not quite the daunting place it used to be for many of the worlds cricketers. This summer we witnessed an Indian side that was much more capable of handling South African conditions than in the past and I fear that the IPL and Champions League being staged here had a little something to do with unravelling the stigma usually attached to Indian touring teams. It could also have something to do with the amount of Afrikaans spoken in the Indian change room nowadays but that topic is best left for another day. The reason why I mention all of this is because the IPL has perhaps levelled playing fields when it comes to dealing with a low, slow, turning Indian wicket. No longer are these conditions completely foreign to cricketers from the other major test playing nations and Canada, considering the amount of Indian born cricketers in their squad. Perhaps the IPL is a poisoned chalice for the BCCI and their neighbours as the once unfathomable sub-continental pitches have become a little bit more playable for certain cricketers who have not only become richer in US Dollars but also in knowledge. And as we all know, knowledge is power.

Just for a moment I’d like to speak about Pakistan. They have had their well documented problems, of that there is no doubt, but just remember that after the first six weeks snooze fest coupled with their “shocking” loss to Canada the tournament moves into knockout phase. And once we reach that phase, anything can happen. One can compare Pakistan to the enigma that is Mike Tyson. Both were world champions in the respective sports in the early nineties. Both have had their run ins with the authorities, inside and outside of their sports. And both of them possess tigers. That’s not really relevant to my point but it doesn’t make it any less true. Getting to that aforementioned point, you would not want to run into Mike Tyson in a dark alleyway or the set of a Hollywood movie because he still has the ability to knock you the hell out. The same can be said for Pakistan, even with all their spot-fixing and Shoaib Akhtar problems. You would not want to run into them in a knockout game on a dusty sub-continental wicket, because come the end of 100 over’s of cricket you may just be hearing Freddie Mercury singing vocals, and the song is not going to be “We are the champions” but rather “Another one bites the dust”.

Having a look at the tournament as a whole, expect many mismatches in the group stages and the major test playing nations to qualify for the quarter-finals, this includes co-hosts Bangladesh. I do feel, however, that the tournament will be won by sub-continental side. And what of South Africa’s chances? We’ll need to win our group to stand a chance of putting our hands on that elusive ICC trophy. If not, expect a loss to Pakistan or India somewhere along the line. It also all depends on the flexibility of our coaches and our use of our ace in the sleeve, Imran Tahir. I’ve had too much heartbreak at the hands of the Proteas to put my confidence in them again, let alone my money. I hope they go all the way, but I wouldn’t bet on it. Long live the World Cup.

Vegas out