Football: Ireland and Henry's Handball

The saga of Thierry Henry’s crucial handball in the World Cup playoff against Ireland has taken increasingly bizarre turns, as the FAI and the media have kept the pressure on FIFA to find a solution to a particularly high profile injustice.

Henry and John O'Shea in the first leg of the playoff tie

The Irish team is popular worldwide, fuelled by goodwill towards its enthusiastic and well-behaved fans, and the team’s performances as underdogs at the 1990, 1994 and 2002 World Cups. They have also benefited from the drama-free English qualification for the World Cup, and the straightforward failure of the other Celtic teams, which meant that they had the British media’s full attention for their playoff with France. Ireland have therefore received a lot of sympathy for their misfortune, but this has not translated into any tangible benefit.

Whilst the Irish cannot be blamed for exhausting every remote possibility for claiming a place at the tournament, they never stood a chance of forcing either a replay or a spot as a 33rd team in South Africa, and FIFA, although appearing incompetent on many levels, have called this issue correctly. There is no guarantee that the Irish would have won the tie anyway, and allowing a replay or admitting an extra team would set the precedent that every mistake made by an official should result in a replay or consolation place. This would create a whole new set of problems: which offences would be worthy, and which would not? How would the flood of extra games be scheduled? Would, for example, Ireland first have to replay their qualifier with Georgia, in which they benefited from an undeserved penalty?

Adding an extra team would have meant changing the balanced 32 team format, adjusting the schedule and logistics, and lumbering four unlucky teams with an extra group game. This was clearly never an option.

The Irish anger at these rejections, and the accusations of bias favouring the top countries has therefore been misplaced, because FIFA could not grant concessions to anyone, and have not stepped in to help countries such as England or The Netherlands in the past, or Russia this year, when they have failed to qualify.

What the debates over the handball, replay and 33rd place have overshadowed is the real injustice of the seeding system, which does genuinely reek of bias. Seeding teams so that the strongest nations avoid each other is not uncommon in sport, nor in itself unfair, but what rankled was that the decision was only made in September, instead of at the start of the qualification tournament. Effectively, the goalposts were moved when the competition was already nearly over.

Michel Platini of UEFA and Sepp Blatter

This incident has raised a couple of key issues for FIFA to tackle. Instead, the governing body has been casting around in search of a way of dealing with the bad publicity, without tackling the problems themselves. The suggestion that Ireland might be awarded some sort of fair play award is patronising and insulting, as Richard Dunne has pointed out. It also ignores the fact that the Irish have not done anything to deserve an award, other than be wronged. FIFA are obviously looking at the precedent of Vanderlei de Lima, awarded the Pierre de Coubertin medal at the Athens Olympics after an attack by a spectator arguably deprived him of a gold medal in the marathon. However, what seemed genuine and spontaneous in that event, awarded on the same day as the incident by Jacques Rogge, seems calculated when mooted weeks after the event by Sepp Blatter. Moreover, whilst the IOC had no alternatives, other than improving security for future events, FIFA could instead spend their time more productively by ensuring no repeat of the seeding fiasco, and taking seriously the controversies created by ever-improving television technology.

The latest development is the threat of a ban for Henry himself, which is inconsistent again. If, as FIFA insists, the referee’s decision is final and video evidence should not be used, why retrospectively ban the player, especially for what would only have been a yellow card? There is no precedent for using this approach for anything less than a red card offence. Many worse crimes will have escaped punishment during the qualifiers, but none will be punished now. This does not absolve Henry, but again FIFA have ducked the real questions by trying to appear proactive, when they are in fact taking minor steps only.

There appears to be little will for real active leadership at FIFA, and sadly for the Irish, with the World Cup draw now dominating the headlines, the Champions’ League groups stage reaching its climax, and the busy Christmas and New Year period approaching, their plight is already yesterday’s news.