Henry´s hand, football and the trap (Yahoo)

A new trap moves the grounds of football and makes us to think on those who manage the destiny of perhaps a massive action by excellence of our present time, since the horrible injustice made in the match France - Ireland that allowed to classify the French for the World Championship, when in the minute 103, Thierry Henry, in an evident offside position, pushed the ball with his hand and could serve a centre for his companion William Gallas thus enabling him to push the balloon against the net..

There appear many ethical questions regarding this situation, and not less hypocritical situations. One of the debates deals with the attitude of the forwarder of Barcelona Henry. What had he to do having clear that with this injustice, not only classified his team, but was leaving unjustly out of the World Championship his rival?

Henry confessed that he lowered the ball with the hand (I told the Irish players, journalists and the referee”) and this ennobles him, but it does not seem enough, not in reference to himself, nor regarding the Swedish referee Martin Hansson, neither and much less, FIFA that already communicated that the match cannot be repeated, covering under an old rule that does not recognize the use of new technologies as not to fall into such injustice.

Maybe Henry ought to have insisted Hansson, or try to convince his comrades of the team to do it or not to accept the sentence recognizing the goal that allowed them to enter into the World Championship? It does not seem so easy, though the fair play would indicated it, but there are not too many antecedents in this sense and the cruel system in which we live, with so many interests involved place this possibility at a utopia level.

It is to such extents that the first ethical collision was produced when Henry confessed to the referee Hansson that he used his hand in the game (moreover that in the first place it should have been annulled all in offside and it did not happen).But already at that point there appeared the first deed questioned from the ethical point of view. There no more clarity for a sentence that the confession of the player himself. We ask ourselves what weighed in Hansson not to annul the goal and it would be also interesting to know what will FIFA do with Hansson as to his continuity as referee of the highest level, after such a “mistake”.

On his side, the always controvertible French coach Raymond Doménech, added another interesting point to the great debated of these days on the ethic and football that we are living with, saying that no apology should be presented and that it was only “an arbitral mistake” but the best comes now. Doménech asked why “when Diego Maradona does it, it is extraordinary and we do it, it is not. Why the double ways of judgment are being used?”.

The French coach reverted to the social hypocrisy to judge these kinds of deeds recalling that in the previous eliminatory “our goalkeeper Hugo Lloris was unjustly expelled vs Serbia when he did nothing, and though, there was no similar movement in the football community”.

In the same line the Irish coach places, ex captain of the team of his country and of the Manchester United and now coach of the Ipswich Town, Roy Keane, “who was more angry with the Irish defenders than with the hand of Henry because even if it was antiregulatory, he does not understand why this ball has not been swept from the area and then we fall in the typical claim that we were robed when for instance, in this same eliminatory vs Georgia they gave us a penal that was not such and with which Robbie Keane converted and we obtained three not merited points but I do not remember the Irish Federation to request from FIFA one match more, as it is requested now”..

Is it that we are prepared for claims for matter of more repercussion above others? Or we do protest when the favored one is someone powerful making harm to a weak one? At least the English “Times” puts this goal of Gallas after the hand of Henry in the first place of historical traps in the sport, paradoxically leaving aside that of “God’s hand” of Maradona in the eleventh place of the scale in which is included the deliberated accident of Nelson Piquet Jr in the Grand Prix in Singapore 2008, the triumph of the Canadian Ben Jonson in the hundred meters in the Games of Seoul in 1988 or the sham of cruel attack of Rivaldo in Brazil-Turkey of the first phase of the World Championship 2002 and also when in the Paraolympic Games in Sydney 2000 ten of the twelve Spanish basketball players have been eliminated upon proving that they had no handicap

However, the English seem to have a thin memory to recall these events, but fragile indeed to recall , for example, that inexistent goal of Hurst not less but at the final of the World Championship in 1966 vs Germany, when the ball bit in the line but never entered, neither, they recall that hand of Paul Scholes in the goal of the Manchester United vs the Zenit of Russia in the final of the European Supercup 2008.

As always, everything depends on the crystal one is looking through and even the ethic seems to have flexible limits reaching the hypocrisy. Meanwhile this occurs, football continues trying to sell its product in the XXI century but with old technology, though everything seems to pass, as the sportive director of the Real Madrid Jorge Valdano said, for believing in Justice, not in the technology. This is only a tool, though without ethic nothing of this will ever serve.