I watched the match on Facebook, because football bores the shit out of me. That was way better. Everyone was getting excited because the Irish team (I’d refer to the team as ‘us’ but we lost so I’m gonna go with ‘them’) winning a match against a team that clearly had played this game before, and by all accounts, they were doing quite well. But then people got angry.
That’s when the bad words started getting posted. At first I assumed people were just being foul because France was better than us at football.
From what I understand a Frenchman called Henry used his hand to touch the ball (you’re not allowed do that in football) but for some reason the referee didn’t notice and then Henry scored a goal. It’s clearly a fault in the football regulatory system that allows hundreds of people to see (even whilst drunk) that a foul was committed, but because looking at a camera is considered blasphemous by the football authorities the ‘ref’ can’t do anything. It’s not Henry’s fault that football is fundamentally flawed, imagine if Roy Keane got away with a handball and scored a goal that would’ve won them the match but then pointed out to the referee that he made a mistake and in the interest of fairness and good sportsmanship he couldn’t allow the goal to be counted. He’d be lynched. Some of the stuff on Facebook is a bit unnecessary though.
Like all other football players, Henry has two arms which, if you spend most of your time focusing on your feet, flail about wildly. They’re on a ball and socket joint for heaven’s sake! I’m assuming seeing as he beat Ireland, I’d like to think Henry is at least ‘quite good’ at football, and you’d imagine players of a high calibre would not intentionally cheat at the job, whilst being watching on television. Unless football is either not really that hard to be good at, or the sport of bastards. It was probably a very silly impulse that he wouldn’t have indulged had he more than a microsecond to decide, get over it. C’mon like, Facebook groups called “I Hate Thierry Henry The Cheating French Frog“ is just racism.
Fair enough, the team did get screwed over but if the rules for governing a football match were abided by there are no real grounds for an appeal. As Henry himself said, “I will be honest, it was a handball. But I’m not the ref. I played it, the ref allowed it. That’s a question you should ask him,” he said. In football the referee’s decision stands. If you don’t like it, take up Ultimate Frisbee or something. They’ve got a method of self-governing which means there is no ref, and it promotes good sportsmanship. It’s still a stupid sport, but not much more than any other sport. Excep
t extreme ironing, that rules.
I can honestly say that at least three good things (for me) have come out of us losing that match. First of all, I had something to write my column about. Otherwise you’d probably be reading about me urinating on tiny goalposts or something. Don’t worry, that’ll almost definitely be in the next issue. The price of French wine has dropped, which I am very happy about. Hot damn cheap French wine makes me very happy indeed. And drunk. But anyway. Sport. Sorry.
The third advantage of the Irish losing is that we don’t have to have a poxy world cup summer where everyone talks about the world cup for fucking months and I’d have to write about it and it’d be so dull. Everyone’d have those wall charts and junk and get all excited and someone’d claim we’d a chance of winning and then when we don’t everyone’d be all like ‘GUTTED AAAAHHHH SOO CLOSE!!1!’ Sure you sports section readers might enjoy that, but it’d just be a pain in my arse. Crisis averted.
It looks like we have to put up with people being racist on Facebook, instead of using it for it’s original purpose, talking about John and Edward.
Rob told me I had to write more than this, but I’ve run out of ideas, so: Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders. Screw Flanders.
