MADAM – The World Cup final – an observation.
As I watched the world cup final on Sunday, I became quite inflamed by the evidence of cheating as displayed in shirt-tugging, tackling to bring men down and cynical purposeful obstructing of play.

It made me feel that football carries a subversive conspiracy of acceptance around this.
The footballers display the testosterone shadow (in Jungian terms) of men.
“Of course, in the heat of the moment they’re bound to get carried away.”
Isn’t this the plea for many rape-fuelled crimes and crimes of violence?
Well, your honour, in the heat of the moment I couldn’t help it.
If we accept this within football, it becomes silently acceptable elsewhere.
We all become vicariously responsible for and responsive to this level of cheating; the competition-fuelled frenzy we all become complicit in when we watch highly (gratuitously) paid professionals hold on to shirts, resort to body barging, let their feet or fists fly.
In no other sport is this level of cheating allowed.
No other sport attracts the crowds and attention that footballers are privileged to enjoy.
It is symptomatic of an endemic masculine self-indulgence.
The remedy – how extreme can we go?
I say red card immediately.
Before such a measure, I’m sure football fans would be in uproar in support of the cheating football professional.
However, If this measure was taken, it would surely enable footballers to discover the self-discipline which other professional sportsmen are expected to display.
In the event of the referee not having a clear view, replays give this clear view and should result in a season’s ban.
Again, I’m sure this would be seen as most unreasonable.
That I didn’t understand the game or how easy it is to get carried away ‘in the heat of the moment’ blab la etc etc.
I rest my case.
There is a conspiracy of acceptance that is endemic in the world of football – among fans as much as players and all the officials that are part of the whole cavalcade of commercialism that goes with the game.
When will this level of cheating be treated with the sanction of contempt which it deserves?
For by instituting a level of acceptability around this kind of cheating and violation, the same is played out in everyday society.
One of the things I take pride in, in my own country and culture, is the ideal of fair play.
Whether it is a myth or on some level a living reality matters not.
It is an ideal which is inviolable, as pure as truth.
If we don’t institute it rigorously through professional sport – and one which is regarded as the common man’s game – then how on earth are we going to mirror that in society on a day-to-day level?
Come on FIFA, come on football fans, come on footballer professionals, make us proud by exemplifying that ideal and making of yourselves a standard and a model for young people to live up to the whole world round.
Sport gives us the opportunity for living metaphor in action.
Let it make us proud of that example rather than see it dissipated and corrupted through unnecessary controversy and a form of rule which makes acceptable what is plainly unacceptable.
Jo Woolley
Stroud