Thierry Henry's Handball was not 'Cheating'
Mike DeCourcy - SportingNews.com
Nov 19, 2009
The headline at Yahoo! when I logged onto the computer to get my e-mail declared, "Soccer Star Admits Cheating In Game."
The site's soccer columnist, Martin Rogers, called Henry "a cheat."
Well, pardon moi, but that's just crap.
Is it disgraceful that Ireland was deprived of a fair result in its World Cup qualifying match against France because the deliberate handball by Thierry Henry led to a game-winning goal by William Gallas? Of course. By the time Henry reached for the ball, the two country's national teams had played 193 minutes of soccer without finding a way to separate themselves.
A rules violation ultimately gave France an edge, and, if it can be avoided, that never should be the case in sports.
There were two ways this could have been avoided, though. First, the referee and his linesmen could have done their jobs adequately. Henry's handling of the ball was not surreptitious. It was blatant. The ball was about to go over the end line, and Henry recognized the only means of keeping it in play was to reach for it. Referee Martin Hansson should have seen it. There's no excuse for missing a rules violation that obvious.
The other means of catching this violation would, of course, have been video replay. The NFL uses it extensively. The NHL uses it on contested scoring plays, like this one. Even Major League Baseball has given in on this issue, to some degree. Soccer refuses, and because of that gets results such as this.
Henry did not "cheat" Ireland any more than a lineman "cheats" when he grabs onto a blitzing linebacker or a power forward cheats when he flops while drawing a charge. It's a referee's job to properly judge what occurs in these instances. Hansson failed, miserably. And don't be surprised if he's reffing big games when the World Cup begins next June. Incompetence by game officials rarely is penalized.
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