The antics of the English FA: A desperate attempt at self-destruction

Some things, they say, never change. I’m sure a vast majority of England supporters will agree with me. It seems it is impossible to predict what the people in the Football Association will do. It was all going well with the appointment of Roy Hodgson as manager of the national football team and his remodeling of the squad: the arrival of new faces, the extra responsibility being discharged beautifully by the senior players and of course, good results, and more than that, excellent performances on the pitch. Third in the FIFA rankings and everything was pointing uphill!

And then, the caretakers of the football in the nation go and mess it up completely! Now, the FA has a right to probe into incidents that occur in domestic football matches in England and hand out punishments to the guilty party. And so they did in the case of John Terry of Chelsea, [and captain of the English football team, let’s not forget] finding him guilty of racially abusing QPR’s Anton Ferdinand in a Premier League match last October. All before this happened they stripped him of the England captaincy since they suspected he had used racist language. Which, all in all, doesn’t make sense. How can you strip him of the captaincy when he hasn’t done anything that has been proved? Tomorrow, an Everton player will accuse Steven Gerrard of throwing a banana skin at him in the tunnel before the match, and the FA will take the armband off Gerrard till the probe is over.

Anyway, that isn’t the main argument. Since when, can you tell me, have the FA become enforcers of the law, especially when the court has found John Terry innocent? So does that mean that the Football Association proclaims itself a higher authority than the law of the land? Apparently it does.

After the game in which the alleged incident occurred, Anton and Terry patched up whatever issues that they had during the game. Then, after watching videos of the incident and being influenced by certain people, Anton suddenly decided that Terry was racist. Terry claims that he used those words only asking Anton whether he had said them before. The TV cameras, conveniently, caught only certain sections of the video. Then Anton refused to shake John Terry’s and Ashley Cole’s hands in the match between their sides a few days ago, with millions of youngsters watching, sending out a message to them to drag personal issues into the game, and basically to hell with the idea of professionalism.

What the FA ought to have done is called Terry and Anton and given them a strict warning, telling them to make up and forget the matter or get severely punished, and that would have been the end of it.

In the bargain, England have lost not one, but two good defenders. Terry has retired from international football, fed up of the FA. And the manager is in no position to select Rio Ferdinand, brother of Anton, whom the England defence desperately needs. It seems surprising to some why England have not done well in major tournaments in recent years and one of the main factors is this attitude of the FA and the British media. The focus is on who should be wearing the armband rather than who is actually playing well. In most nations the captaincy is not a big issue, with the most senior player taking it up. The newspapers spend more time screaming for the older players to be axed rather than highlighting good young talent. Let’s hope that there are more people like Roy Hodgson who can change the style of thinking, which is absolutely necessary if the team is to flourish. With excellent talent, youth systems and coaching staff, great things lie ahead, if only one opens one’s eyes.