It's not Cheating, it's Football!
After the success of the British athletes at the recent Olympic games we applaud the efforts of the competitors and give thanks for the virtual absence of positive drugs tests. Those who take drugs are cheats. Cheating, certainly within sport is something that should not be tolerated. Those that would intentionally cheat to gain an advantage should be humiliated, named, shamed and cast from the sport for eternity.
What of football? A sport where participants are taught and encouraged to cheat, lie, and bully from a very early age.
From my own personal recollections. I was ten years old and the referee was my maths teacher, he was huge and very scary. You couldn't so much as cough in his presence. Cough could be mistaken for something ending in off, and rest assured you would be! There would be time to reflect in the shower on your perceived sin. If you didn't get it then, detention offered you a little more time to reflect.
Watching football on television, I see where it all started. Defenders claim for offside at every opportunity. If the ball should go out of play, then both players claim 'our ball' as a matter of course. It's not the referee they appeal to, it's the linesman. They have been trained to cheat this way. At school the linesman was the fat kid, or the kid with asthma, or maybe even the wimp that nobody wanted to pick. The kid running the line was weak, he could be influenced, bullied even. You could glare at him whilst claiming 'offside' or 'our ball'. He had to agree for fear of reprisals during tomorrow's Geography lesson.
In football the punishment clearly does not fit the crime. Infringement of the rules in athletics, accidental or not, is punished by disqualification. To cheat with the intent to gain advantage brings a ban from two years to life. These punishment are scary, yellow cards are not.
The respect campaign will be relegated to the Blue Square Premier League, it can't survive at the top, there's too many juicy carrots and not a stick in sight.
It seems if we want to beat the cheats, we'll have to do while they're young. Sadly, that's called abuse, and we all know that abuse is the job of the season ticket holders.