“If I met him in the street I would slap him.”
By Tony Attwood
Untold, from its earliest days, has carried the argument that FIFA is a bent organisation organising bent tournaments. The site has only reported a handful of the incidents that lead to that conclusion, but if you want more you only have to type Jack Warner corruption into Google to find that you get over 47,000 results – and that tells you something by itself. (If you want a good summary, try the BBC’s piece, “The Beautiful Bung” which gives a fair old roundup of just how bent Fifa can be.)
But it’s on, it’s happening, and the English media has defined the world cup as a “Good Thing”.
So we turn to look at England’s first match (they are playing the United States of America – just in case you didn’t notice) and we find that the referee for the match, Carlos Eugênio was suspended last season by his national federation for bribery and incompetence.
This is the one who, despite apparently speaking fluent English, is being given lessons in how to speak Scouse Swearing, so he can communicate with Rooney et al.
Now of course everyone is innocent until proven the opposite (except perhaps Rooney, oh and Gerrard, and that John Terry, and….), and we must admit that Carlos Eugênio Simon was a ref at the last world cup, and the one before that too. So maybe he is ok, although we must also note that the Brazilian football confederation wouldn’t let him blow the whistle for the last six weeks of the Brazil league season after a number of alleged errors led to the president of Palmeiras to denounce him as “a crook, a scoundrel and a shameless bastard”.
(I wonder if Mr Rooney, who was told off for naughty words in an England warm up match, knows that phrase. “A crook, a scoundrel and a shameless bastard”. Or if the ref considers that unacceptable language. Walter – can you send a player off for calling the ref a crook and a scoundrel and a shameless bastard?)
Earlier, Flamengo of Brazil lost to Cruzeiro and so lost a place in the South American Champs League. Flamengo were so cheesed off by the sending off of Diego Tardelli in that game (Tardelli thought he had been fouled in the area and appealed for a penalty, but was sent off for diving) that they sent a DVD to Jérôme Valcke (general secretary of FIFA) , politely requesting that the ref be refused permission to be in the world cup and instead have his head put in a vat of boiling oil.
The aforementioned video of the refs misdemeanours is reported as starting, “The video evidence collected and hereby submitted – attesting the unambiguously inconsistent, unfair and inequitable technical performance of Mr Simon – provides the Fifa referees’ committee with a factual account to illustrate the risks of retaining him in the list of referees for the 2010 World Cup. Flamengo has done this for the sake of good order and for the good of the game.”
But no – Fifa carried on. Carlos Eugênio Simon carried on.
The Palmeiras president, Luiz Gonzaga Belluzzo, expressed the mood of many when he said, “He must be in someone’s pocket. If I met him in the street, I would slap him. What he did was unbelievable and he was helping Fluminense. He should be driven out of football.” It was after this that the Brazilian federation banned him for “a repetition of mistakes committed during the competition”.
And that’s quite a bit of the case really. If you have a ref who has been suspended for “a repetition of mistakes committed during the competition” would you allow him to referee in the topmost competition in the world?
The answer is…
- no – if he is not good enough to carry on in his local league he can’t carry on in the world cup
- absolutely he is just the sort of guy we want
So, we can watch and see – and note the usual ITV / BBC pretence that no referee is ever bent, only incompetent, largely due to the fact that they are foreign and they don’t understand the game that we English invented, and only gave to the world through the kindness of our hearts. Look, we give the other nations a game, and what do they do? They beat us at it, that’s what they do. One can hardly call that fair!
In the meantime there’s the strange issue of the ball and the altitude. You might have thought it was just a goalkeeping whinge, this ball business, and as for altitude, well if you’ve been up the Monument, you know about the high stuff.
But no, there is more. I’ll come on to that shortly.
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Before you comment please read this
Next season’s squad: we’ve signed four, the fifth is identified, and the sixth would be another steal from Barca if it comes off.
The Index of Very Ancient but still Quite Interesting Things
What to read in between World Cup matches
Tony,
I think the answer you have given is the correct one. Suspending a ref is not something that any football association will do lightly. Usually any FA will support the ref against attacks. But in this case it looks that there was something strange going on. So he must have made some very strange decisions. I never have heard about any FA suspending one of his referee’s for making a lot of bad mistakes.
What happens sometimes is like we have seen in Belgium a few months ago when a ref who was doing one of his first games committed a lot of realy bad errors. Were it his nerves, was he incompetent (because of the we all knows eachoter promotion system) or was he a secret fan of the team he gave the advantage? After that game our FA decided to send him back for some time to the lower leagues to give him a mental break. This is a more likely kind of punishment.
But a Fifa ref that has done world cups before and then being suspended by his own federation and then he still goes to the world cup???? This is realy amazing and like you say: this is the guy you want to have something done.
Tony and Walter
Is it really possible to prevent any of this alleged (and often proven) corruption?
For every bad lad (I could come up with a better description) who is caught and removed, there appears a new one.
Maybe the devil you know…
this referee is an asshole, he had a smug smile on his face when sending off swedish player teddy lucic against germany WC 2006. Teddy Lucic comitted two fouls that game and was sent off he should have had a yellow at most
My forecast is that Rooney will get a red before England exit from the World Cup. A combination of South African heat, the pressure of each game and “hearing aids” worn by ultra sensitive referees will respond to the red mist. I hope I’m wrong but L don’t think so.
Tony,
about your question can you send a player off I was starting to write an answer but it is almost longer than your article and I’m not even halfway. So I was thinking that I could put it in an article so that we all know how the instructions are and what to do.
Funny thing about the altitude! Why did england train in the Austrian terrains where the altitudes were lower than the ones in SA? Dont sportsmen train at higher altitudes to work their lungs out before a competition?
@Nicky. It’s a bit Pearl Harbourish here at the moment. Our winter (much about the same as your average English summer day!) does get a bit chilly when the sun goes down. It’s about 18 degrees here (Durban)at the moment, colder in Joburg. Mind you, nice weather forecast for the weekend…bar Cape Town where winter is cold and wet anyway…and we expect +-28 degrees high, 15 low.
If anything gets to Rooney, it’s more likely to be altitude when they play in and around Jhb… not to mention the efforts of “a crook, a scoundrel and a shameless bastard,” (Walter, sorry, but aren’t they all?)
Rooney couldn’t possibly know how to say “A crook, a scoundrel and a shameless bastard”. It doesn’t start with “y’know” and it contains words with more than one syllable.
GF60, we are… we are… 😉
There’s more to this altitude thing that meets the eye, or the lungs.
I’ve got some interesting data on it, and will try and get it written up today.
Tony
thanks for the tip, im taking usa for this game.
England will be one of FIFA’s favoured teams in the competition because of the size of the TV audience in the UK. If anyone is assisted, by this ‘crook, scoundrel and shameless bastard’ in this game it will not be the US.
Perry Grove, the leniency of the refs in the UK have not done ‘wazza’ any favours. If he was punished for his regular outbursts as he should have been, he would have learned his boundaries and developed the ability to control himself better. I will be amazed if he gets through this WC without a red or at the least so many yellows that he has to miss a key game.
The problem is how the fifa board are nominated.
There should be votes by all clubs in europes top leagues yearly 1 vote each and when fifa are allowing crap to go on we could get the likes of blatter and platini voted out for failure to clean the game up …when they are answerable to no one this crap will always continue and the way its set up right now looks as if they are answerable to no one.
Can’t blame the ref for last night’s crap.
Did Rob Green seeing paper gossip about him being an Arsenal target make him do a Fabianski audition??