Bill Shankly is supposed to have said, ‘Football is not a matter of life and death, it is greater than that.’ Perhaps he was right. But that presumes that the referee was not on the take.
The way the football Premier League is run, no rigged, we know the rough order of the teams at the end of the season. Only curiosity about how the individual matches will unfold towards this inevitable outcome keeps me engaged on the sofa with wifey during the long winter nights. We won’t win the league but hope of landing a trophy by mistake also keeps us going. Our victory in the Carabao Cup last season was all the sweeter because it does not happen to us everyday and as far as I remember had no controversial moments. I would say that, wouldn’t I.
I was watching the afternoon match with my wife last Saturday more to keep her company than for any skin in the game when the underdogs and away side, Fulham, scored. A neat pirouette by Muiz, left Chalobah of Chelsea writhing on the ground. The ball broke to Berge who played a beautiful through the lines pass to the teenage Josh King, who raced up the left channel, briefly looked as if he’d overrun or lost it, turned inside Adarabioyo and scored through the defender’s legs and inside the near post. During the VAR review I said to my wife if they overturned this goal I was going to clean the pond or dig up terrorist weeds, anything. VAR took play back to find that Muniz stepped on Chalobah’s innocent instep, “recklessly” or “carelessly” according to the referee.
I walked out. The Koi in the pond are the better for it. Terrorist weeds not so lucky.
I was playing football with my grandson yesterday when my wife ran out to tell me that the referees’ organisation had apologised for the mistake. We accept and move on. It’s football.
But what if we learned that Chelsea paid referees – foreign trips, designer wear, shopping trips for spouses, computers for their kids etc. And when Chelsea played, they were allowed to gouge out eyes, kick your teenage forward to smithereens, spit in your face, racially abuse you but you got sent off for complaining? Penalties were awarded to Chelsea out of thin air, legitimate goals by the opposition denied. In the unlikely event that Chelsea lost the match it was chalked off or abandoned or the points awarded to them for dubious or arbitrary reasons, say, for legacy? We would be furious. Would we not? Or did I choose the wrong example. Substitute Saudi backed Newcastle for Chelsea then. Does the Muslim angle work? Before Geordies complain, I am a Geordie too.
Our MPs resume in Parliament today. They are our referees and write the rules. When I first heard or read that the likes of our Home Secretary might have received money from Israeli lobbyists I couldn’t believe it. How can the impartial custodians of “our democracy” be allowed to take money from anyone? Other than the fat salaries and pensions we pay them?
Yet it also happens in the much more influential United States of America. For example, Hakeem Jeffries, a Black man and the Minority leader of the US House of Representatives has received about a million dollars from AIPAC. Charlamagne tha God recently brilliantly nicknamed him Aipac Shakur. Yet he is only one of scores of AIPAC bunnies at the top of politics in the “West.” Is it any wonder that probably more than a hundred thousand may be dead and buried under rubble in Gaza and the United States says it is the fault of the Palestinians for getting in the way of the Israelis genocidal bombs? You couldn’t make it up.
Josh, you will be disappointed to be denied your first Premiership goal, but you know you have the talent and ability to make it count. They cannot take that away from you.
It was a mistake. Nobody died. Unlike in Palestine.
