Sepp Blatter once again shows a huge amount of chutzpah in urging the poor of South Africa to go out and buy tickets, to save his bacon. There is a real chance of stadia being half-empty, which will be conclusive proof (if any were needed) that the decision to make South Africa the first African nation to hold the world cup was a deeply flawed one.
We are now creeping towards the 100-day marker for the world cup in South Africa in the summer, which is starting to have an intriguing side-effect on the Premier League. It is a very difficult thing to spot, but any team with a number of World Cup-bound players in it, is going to suffer a little as those players begin to get the injury-sweats. To pick up an injury at this stage – with only a couple of weeks before national managers make provisional decisions about their final squad – would be absolutely calamitous, and the players are more than aware of it.
The latest revelations of match fixing in European football are a concern, not so much for the fact that they exist (because we have known about the existence of betting scams for four decades), but because the lack of action from the football governing authorities on a vital subject. An excellent article in this weekend’s New York Times by Declan Hill made the very valid point that while US sports governing bodies all have very active and effective security sections, both FIFA and UEFA (double the size at then some of the NFL) have done little or nothing to curb the rapid recent rise in illegal betting activity in its sport.
Poor old, Thierry Henry.
After all, it may not be just Ireland who will be conspicuous by their absence in South Africa next June.
The French superstar, globally acknowledged as an all-round good egg, is likely to have paid the ultimate sacrifice in putting his country’s best interests before his own.
It was his illegal hand – and his hand alone – that booked France a place in the world’s greatest competition. But in the strangest of ironies, it may be the hand of an organisation founded in the French capital, Paris, that plays the final cards in this sordid saga.
Because FIFA, a French-run body right down to its official language (the acronym is in French – Fédération Internationale de Football Association) may have no choice but to ban the French striker for bringing the game of football into disrepute.
