Ah, it’s that time of year again – you know, the time between January and December. It’s cold, it’s grey, it’s dark in the morning, and the FA are useless. Nothing ever changes. If you believed what you read, there is nothing that our football association can do right. They stumble from one catastrophe to another, squeezing in a faux-pas in the morning, a bungled committee meeting in the afternoon, before an evening of turning a blind eye to all the game’s ills.
And it might be fair to say that in the past, this description of the FA wasn’t a million miles away from the truth. In its chequered history it hasn’t always dealt with things the right way – the building of the new Wembley was the gleaming piece of faceces in the list, a horrendous series of botch-jobs from the FA and many others. Their attempts to gain the World Cup last year hardly covered themselves in glory, though they had to toe the party-line to succeed, and who can blame them for their anger at the final result? I’d be out revenge too after that stitch-up.
So yes, this is an organisation that hasn’t always covered itself with glory. But recently, more than ever, it is being criticised for doing everything wrong, proof that sometimes, however it acts, it can actually do no right.
The most recent example can be borne from a stunningly eye-watering bout of ignorance on Twitter, where Joey Barton and Stan Collymore gave their ten remaining brain cells a run-out whilst slagging off the FA. Joey Barton had once more decided to put the world to rights by expressing his view on the trial adjournment involving John Terry to after the European Finals. Stan soon joined in and it was agreed that the FA had yet again shown themselves to be incompetent. Barton expressed his disgust that the case had gone to trial, and was dragging on this long, and the blame was put firmly at the door of you-know-who. Yes, that’s right, it’s apparently the FA’s fault that a member of the public made a complaint to the police, which necessitated a trial, subject to sufficient evidence being available. Apparently it’s the FA’s fault that the case was adjourned (they now run the courts it seems). And of course it’s the FA’s fault for not holding their own enquiry whilst there is a police investigation underway (quite sensibly for anyone with a brain). The worrying thing is, how many other people carry these idiotic views around with them?
This adds to the astonishing criticism they received from Liverpool Football club after the investigation into Luis Suarez. That’s the investigation carried out by an independent panel that was approved by Liverpool.
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Naturally, when Terry was subsequently stripped of his captaincy, further criticism followed. Not least from Fabio Capello, though his comments were predictably sensationalized by the red-tops to create a bigger story, and at least the tabloids’ hatred of Capello has taken the heat off the FA for the time being. To be honest, whatever the FA did, they were onto a hiding to nothing. If they did nothing, then the trial would have hung over the national team for the next six months, mentioned at every press conference, in every newspaper article, the elephant in the room that the FA turned a blind-eye to. If they had handed the decision over to Capello, they would have been accused of passing the buck. Having done what they have done, they are accused of condemning a man who is innocent until proven guilty. Of course they have done no such thing – the committee realised that they had to do something so that the team could concentrate on football. Such a sensitive issue shouldn’t be the responsibility of one man anyway, a manager who won’t even be there by the time the trial starts. After all, they had acted before, removing Lee Bowyer and Jonathan Woodgate from selection before their trial (admittedly for a more serious crime, and Bowyer hadn’t yet been called up anyway). If Terry had any integrity, he would have made the decision for them – harsh perhaps for a man who protests vehemently his innocence, but sometimes you have to take a bullet. He hasn’t lost his place in the team/squad, or any money. In the real world, anyone accused of a similar crime would be suspended in no time.
The recent spate of criticism all started though on the pitch, with a spate of controversial red cards that left Manchester City fans especially feeling that the world was against them. Again however, as I have written previously, the FA really didn’t do much wrong, when dealing with the litany of tackles that left some players with suspensions and some free to carry on, due to the frustrating rule regarding restrospective bans for incidents that the referee claims not to have seen. This is a matter out of the FA’s hands, what with it being a FIFA rule – you see, FIFA don’t like matches being re-refereeing after the event, so if the referee has seen something, he cannot be overruled – unless of course your name is Ben Thatcher, who the FA ripped up the rules for, and as a reward got a stern letter off FIFA expressing their disappointment. Anyway, it isn’t the FA making these rules, and it isn’t the FA making the wrong decisions in the first place, and it isn’t the FA claiming suspiciously at times to have not seen something they were looking straight at. The FA have to back their referees, even if they are called Chris Foy.
I’m no FA apologist. There are plenty of things I think they can do to improve the beautiful game – fully implement the Respect campaign, for starters cutting out swearing at referees, a trait that is copied right down to the school pitches, implement a proper campaign for the development of youth players rather than copying the current most productive foreign system, invest in coaches, and so on. But let’s not put all the game’s ills at their door. Mistakes have been made, and will continue to be made – but sometimes there is simply nothing more they can do. And when they do act, what’s clearer than a Peter Crouch eye-gouge is that somewhere, someone will be criticising them for it.
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