Source: Daily_Mail
PATRICK COLLINS: Chelsea should be kicked out of Europe for a year
The feeble excuses have been made and the bogus apologies have been mumbled. And, at the close of a shameful week, Chelsea Football Club await their punishment. Sadly, they appear confident of the outcome.[LNB]An honest referee has been cruelly traduced and physically threatened. A grand European occasion has been reduced to a tawdry farce. And the tattered remnants of football's reputation have been paraded across a few million television screens.[LNB]Now UEFA, who will sit in judgment this week, are acutely aware of all these factors.[LNB] Chelsea players let their frustrations against the referee show after they crashed out of the Champions League on Wednesday[LNB]They are also aware that Chelsea are improbably wealthy, politically powerful and notoriously vindictive. So the best guess is that the odious Didier Drogba will be served up as the designated victim and given perhaps a six-match European ban, while the club will have their knuckles gently rapped. And that will be the end of it.[LNB]But, of course, it must not be the end since events at Stamford Bridge tell us too many disquieting truths about the state and nature of our national game. The incidents are distressingly familiar. There was Drogba's eye-popping, finger-jabbing, foulmouthed eruption. There was Michael Ballack's manic posturing when a decision did not suit him. There was Jose Bosingwa, who called the referee 'a thief' and said he 'had been bought'.[LNB]The whole affair was vile, scandalous, despicable. And yet, given the arrogant insularity which afflicts English football, it was also predictable.[LNB]Consider the responses to the ugliness of Stamford Bridge. Jamie Redknapp, Sky TV's resident intellectual, was apparently enraged by the referee's nationality. Mr Tom Henning Ovrebo comes from Norway and Redknapp found that unforgiveable.[LNB] More from Patrick Collins... PATRICK COLLINS: Sir Henry's 75 and still a bloody treasure02/05/09 Crisis at the heart of our Ashes summer25/04/09 Patrick Collins: Hiddink shows he is right man for big stage 19/04/09 Surely football's had enough of this bigotry18/04/09 Patrick Collins: Tiger rates with the greatest of them all15/04/09 Shearer's hardly the man to work a Geordie miracle04/04/09 Carving your initials doesn't make you important, DW 28/03/09 PATRICK COLLINS: Ban the clowns from this touchline cabaret21/03/09 VIEW FULL ARCHIVE'I'm sorry, you can't referee in Norway and keep up to the pace and make the right decisions,' he said of an experienced international referee who had put in a poor performance. In Jamie's myopic little world only English/Spanish/Italian citizens would be given custody of a whistle.[LNB]Philip Neville, the Everton captain, gravely informed us that: 'We want to see emotion and it is what makes football so great.' So that's all right, then. Graeme Souness, who actually knows better, peddled a populist conspiracy theory. 'The people at UEFA will not be unhappy that it's not an all-English Cup final,' he said. And one could imagine the lonely loons of the chat-rooms flexing their typing fingers at the nudge and wink.[LNB]Most disappointing of all was Steve Coppell, who prattled the old pro's platitudes about 'pressure' and 'passion' and how you can only know how Chelsea players feel if you've actually been there and done it. We remembered the antics of Drogba and Ballack.[LNB]We also recalled Coppell's perceptive remarks last year: 'To see the way officials are abused by players on a game-by-game basis it's no wonder we have problems in society . . . 10- or 11- year-olds abuse referees the same as they see their heroes do on the telly.' We expected more from this intelligent man.[LNB]And then there was John Terry. Most intriguingly, there was Terry.[LNB]This is the man who wears a captain's armband which bears the word Respect. This is the man whom Fabio Capello chose to lead England. And this is the man who was to be found at the forefront of Chelsea's protests the other evening; mouth open, arms waving, temper long lost as he confronted the match official.[LNB]His reflections were a masterpiece of barrack-room legalese. 'The word conspiracy is maybe the wrong one,' said Terry.[LNB]Note the cunning 'maybe'. Then: 'I don't use the word "cheat", that's your word. It's a strong word to use,' he said, using the strong word.[LNB]Then, most telling of all, he attempted a defence of Drogba. 'I'm fully behind Didier, the way he reacted,' he said. 'You can see the passion he played with in the game and afterwards. The fact is the referee is the one who should face the consequences, not Didier and not us by not going through.'[LNB]Drogba is the player who lost all control, informed the nation that the referee was 'a f*****g disgrace' and had to be held back by colleagues and stewards. And Terry is 'fully behind' him, effectively endorsing his actions. Sure, the fact that Drogba issued a political apology next day might be a tad confusing. Did Terry endorse the apology as well as the offences?[LNB]I have no idea. But UEFA might want an answer to that question.[LNB]They might also want to know why Roman Abramovich has made no public apology for his club's latest outrage, preferring to communicate by discreet leaks to lackeys.[LNB]And they may wonder if Guus Hiddink really has changed the ethos of the club or if it still conforms to the depressing standards of Jose Mourinho.[LNB]And, having weighed all that in the balance, they may decide on realistic punishments - a two-year European ban for Drogba, six European matches for both Ballack and Bosingwa, three games for Terry.[LNB]And a one-year ban for Chelsea, suspended for three years in the hope that they might discover some self-respect in the interim.[LNB]Football would throw up its hands in horror, of course. There would be paranoid squeals of foreign plots. And Michel Platini would once again be cursed as the arch-enemy of all that is wonderful in English football. So be it.[LNB]I have no great expectations that such a penalty will be imposed and I suspect that Chelsea's complacent confidence is well founded. I hope that UEFA opt for boldness because it would represent one small step for sanity, justice and that other virtue which is so loudly trumpeted and so little observed.[LNB]Ah yes, Respect.[LNB] Richie's wild about HughesHughes: Promising[LNB]In more than 60 years of watching and playing cricket, Richie Benaud has seen the great ones come and go. He has also seen a good many of those who reached out for greatness and never quite found it. So what, I asked him last week, did he make of Phillip Hughes, the latest Australian prodigy who has been scoring runs by the ton for Middlesex?[LNB]Now Benaud is not given to glib praise. A cautious judge, he considers his words like a miser counting his change. But a smile creased his face at the mention of Hughes. 'He is,' said Richie, 'a terrific player. Just terrific.' A pause, and then: 'Sorry about that.' [LNB]Next day, Hughes took 195 runs off Surrey. By the close of this Ashes summer, I fear we shall all have reason to be sorry.[LNB] ...while Lord's is just blankThe sun was beaming broadly in London yesterday. I imagine Lord's must have looked particularly fine; green and stately, and totally empty. The Test match had ended within three days and cricket was contemplating a blank weekend. And a sport in desperate need of support had nothing to offer its prospective customers.[LNB]I realise that this miniseries was belatedly arranged. And I accept that even a mundane West Indies team, playing in alien conditions, might have taken the match into a fourth and fifth day. But it should not have been beyond the ECB to contrive a schedule which would have guaranteed weekend cricket.[LNB] Lords only saw three days of cricket as England smashed a hapless West Indies[LNB]British sport is beset by all manner of problems. But, on a bright May day in London, we reflected that its greatest problem remains the people who run it.[LNB] PSWhen they asked Sam Allardyce for his advice on how to survive in the Premier League, he replied: 'You must get the players to play the best they can.' In a normal week, that gem would have strolled off with the Bleedin' Obvious Award. But this was the week which saw Ricky Hatton battered senseless inside two rounds in Las Vegas. Asked to explain Hatton's plight, his trainer, Floyd Mayweather Snr, sagely confided: 'He didn't keep his hands up.' [LNB] [LNB] [LNB] [LNB]
