In England these days, sounds of gnashing of teeth, of wailing and whingeing permeate any discussion of the Premiership, of money in football, of the futility of England’s attempt to be a part of next year’s European Championships. Given a reprieve when Israel beat Russia, England had their feet on their own destiny, but they lost to Croatia at Wembley. For the first time since 1994, the national team failed to qualify for a major tournament. Why? Oh, why? all the voices say. What can we do?

An island people, English folk have a reserved attitude to strangers, and so the first instinct might be to blame the troubles of the national team on foreigners. That is exactly what happened. Football pundits called for a restriction on the number of foreign players on each team in the Premiership. Sepp Blatter, the head of FIFA, called for restrictions; his European counterpart and sometime pet poodle Michel Platini said it was impossible, even though he favors it. He has made the point that “There are 95 registered Brazilian players in the Champions League, 94 French players and 45 English players”, which puts England at a disadvantage.

Even politicians plunged into the fray. George Brown, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and his culture secretary urged protection (from imports) for English players in order to maintain the quality of the national team. But the knowing football people, Arsène Wenger of Arsenal, for instance, did not agree. “Do you really think that if I regularly started with five average English players, England would win the World Cup?” he scoffed. “I have only been here since 1996 but between 1966 (when England won the World Cup) and 1996 you had 30 years without foreign players and you still didn’t win anything.”

It comes down to Brits wanting to protect the national team, and Wenger, a Frenchman, wanting to protect the quality of the game by getting the best players, wherever they are from. And he has the law on his side. Within the European Union since 1995, laws allow players to move freely back and forth, just as any skilled craftsman or professional can. If there are no quotas for plumbers, there can be none for soccer-players.

For many, many years before the sixties and seventies, British clubs foreswore formal coaching of players and youth. There is a telling story of a former manager of England giving his players complex instructions before an international match to “…watch out for the tall blond fellow at corners.” Good advice, since they were playing Norway, but hardly sophisticated tactical planning!

Many observers believe that the fundamental problem with English soccer is that the Football Association has a poor foundation for training players, especially young players. If that be the case, then no amount of restrictions and quotas in the Premiership are going to help the problem. In fact, any English player playing against the best in the world in that competition will benefit from it, and theoretically, so will the national team.

And as for me, if I am going to lay out the money to watch a Premiership game, I want to see the best, not some journeymen struggling. As Wenger says: “The purpose is to push the level up as high as possible and to entertain.” I agree.

In an e-mail to me a short time ago, a friend of mine from England (we met as undergraduates forty-eight years ago!) made a few comments about the state of soccer in Britain, and he set me thinking and reading about it in a way I hadn’t, despite my devotion to this game for more than 55 years. As I wrote a short time ago (May 28, 2007 in the archive, it’s a simple game no more.

Billions of dollars from TV and sponsorships cascade into the Premiership, gorgeous new stadia have appeared in city after city, players can earn more than $250K per week, and foreign stars wishing to play in one of the best, if not the best, leagues in the world have agents busy touting their qualities, with hefty “bungs” (incentives) changing hands during some, but not all, negotiations with clubs. It’s more a business—a profitable, and sometimes unsavoury one—than a sport these days, whetting the appetites of foreign investors from the U.S., Russia, Thailand and elsewhere for a meal of British soccer-money.

So why would anyone in an irredeemably capitalist society want things to change? Do we want to return to the days (which I remember very well) of impoverished clubs saved by the charity of occasional benefactors, to dilapidated stadia, to exploited players unable to find prosperity? Is that the alternative to the excesses of the modern game?

Inevitably, I suppose, the situation is more complicated, because as in any society, human emotions take over and determine—perhaps more than reason—whatever progress is made. In the case of England and the Premiership: envy, fear, nationalism, disgust and class-struggle all play a part in the discussion.

The envy is obvious, for who wouldn’t want to earn more than $200,000 a week? It become sickeningly so when just twelve days ago a government minister Gerry Sutcliffe, (for sport, no less) declared about John Terry that “..it is obscene to be on £150,000 a week. People in the street cannot understand salaries like that.”
John Terry is captain of England and Chelsea, and is their starting center-back, was selected for the World Cup all-star team, and his weekly salary is actually £130,000. Be that as it may, but like Terry, Gerry himself is a working-class bloke, left school at sixteen, worked as a salesman and in the printing trade where he became a representative for his union, and thence into politics. As a government minister he doesn’t make the kind of money that Terry takes home, and that seems to p**s him off.

Maybe Sutcliffe covets the footballers life, which he should know is very much shorter than the life of the average politician. Sutcliffe’s comment smacks of pure envy, and to call the salary obscene, when he was a member of the British government that joined with the U.S. in the war in Iraq that has cost hundreds of thousands of lives, is hypocrisy of the crudest kind. And does he complain about super-rich entertainers, or about J.K. Rowling making billions from pottering about writing fairy tales?

Add fear to the mix, when people suggest that the system in the Premiership is economically unsustainable, and small wonder that there is talk of (among other things) setting salary-caps to keep the fans’ costs down. But the business model that drives foreign acquisition of big clubs is similar to the model for a lot of business take-overs: borrow money to make the acquisition of a thriving business, then use profits to pay down the debt.

You may not like the model, but it is not out of line with normal capitalist maneuvering. It only becomes unsustainable when people refuse to pay to go to games, and even then, the biggest source of income for the Premiership is worldwide television, not tickets. Is it likely that fans won’t pay to go to games? Manchester United increased their ticket-prices, but Old Trafford is still full.

[On Monday I’ll look at the argument about how the Premiership affects the English national team, and whether something should be done about it.]

A few days ago, after a first-round playoff game in MLS between Houston and Dallas, I used a letter from a fan (and referee) to illustrate a weakness in the league policy about officiating. One of the most experienced referees in the league systematically ignored one of his responsibilities for ensuring a fairly-played match for the entertainment of the spectators and for the good of the game.

That performance, as it now becomes clear, came at the start of ten days in which Major League Soccer’s inadequate officiating was embarrassingly exposed for spectators and television viewers to cry over. The assassination of The Beautiful Game continued unabated . . .

The Chicago Fire beat D.C. United on aggregate goals on November 1, after a 2-2 draw in Washington. It was not without controversy, however, for the referee , a full-time official, took no disciplinary action when United goalkeeper tripped Calen Carr at the edge of the penalty-area in the second half. No penalty-kick, no sending off.

The official partially redeemed himself when he sent off a player at the end of the game (94 minutes). Although it was an “easy” decision because the player was from the losing team and will suffer no consequences, it was better than ignoring the offense, as happened in similar circumstances last year.

The Chicago coach, Juan Carlos Osorio, could not stay silent. He said that since he joined the club at mid-season he’s had trouble adjusting to the quality of the officiating in the league. “I just can’t hold it any longer,” Osorio said. “It’s really, really bad. … The one thing I know for a fact we have to improve is the refereeing. Hopefully they will not fine me for saying that.”

Then another fine mess the following night: another of the league’s full-time referees worked the FC Dallas/Houston match on November 2. By the time it was over, eleven players had had their name inscribed in the book: nine cautioned, one sent off for violent conduct, and another sent off on getting his second caution. Twelve acts of misconduct in 120 minutes of play, seven in regulation, five in overtime. Would any spectator enjoy watching such a match?

There is a positive in all this. Three of the cards were for delaying a restart, presumably after the referee or his masters had read my piece complaining about such lack of enforcement. (This site on October 29.) Like those late-night commercials say: “But that’s not all you get!”

On Saturday, Kansas City played Chivas USA in the final game of their series. It ended in a draw and so K.C. went through, but not before some terrible fouls. I could write a long article about this single game, but suffice it to say that the young referee, looking completely shell-shocked by what was going on around him, never got a grip on the proceedings after he allowed play to continue in the 19th minute when a player was floored by a foul-from-behind that left him down and in pain. No foul, no caution, nothing, for an potentially crippling foul for which the laws require that the criminal be sent off.

But there’s more! Later in the game, the referee got a clear view of one player launching himself airborne at an opponent, feet-first, studs raised, impacting the player above the ankle. Known as a “two-footed tackle”, it is hated by players, is an automatic red card in the Premiership in England, but here it resulted in only a caution, presumably for “ungentle conduct”.

Soon I will explain why some of this decision-making comes about.

As much progress as Major League Soccer makes, what with Beckham at L.A. and other international stars hinting that they might like to come over here to play—Thierry Henry for one—there is still one weakness that has not changed in almost ten years. It is the quality of the refereeing. And many observers have been saying that the league will stagnate unless it does something about its officiating.

The comments come from so many different participants in the sport–fans, players, referees, writers, coaches, commentators—that you’d think that by now the league would have taken notice. But no, their collective heads remain firmly embedded in the sand.

Here’s an example that came as an e-mail to me in the last day or two, from someone who referees, instructs referees, watches games at all levels, and who wants to enjoy watching the pros. His comments speak for themselves:

One of the difficulties we face as referees and as instructors is the visibility of professional games where players create new norms for bad behavior (think of Wayne Rooney’s in-the-face applause a couple of years back), and referees do not administer the game as we are taught.

As a referee attempting to officiate matches that are enjoyable to players and spectators, I stop this when I see it. Once or twice I have even had to eject high-level amateur players for repeated cautions, as they mimicked this behavior. When they see a glaring difference between the officiating in a professional game and their own semi-professional match, the natural assumption is that what you see on TV is how it is supposed to be. A US FIFA referee, working a playoff game in our top professional division must know how it is done, right?

Yes, he must, which leads to the inevitable conclusion that he did not enforce the laws, because someone in the league had instructed him not to. If he did his duty, he would have issued yellow cards, which might result in a player or players having to sit out a game. There are some in MLS who do not want players, especially star players, to have to sit out games at this time of the season.

As anyone who understands this game will tell you, that attitude is a perversion of the way that the game is supposed to be played—is played elsewhere in the world—and MLS hurts its reputation by allowing it to persist. Where are the referees with courage?

In news reports of matches, readers are subjected to opinions of varying quality, especially in discussion of the laws of the game. The “denial of a goal-scoring opportunity” is especially contentious because it involves a player getting sent off.

Here is a classic that has all the elements that a referee must use before he pulls the red card. I thought you’d enjoy it, and since I know the referee, honest and true to the game, I couldn’t resist putting it up.

• It is a clear foul, in this case holding an opponent, eventually pulling him to the ground.

• The attacker had passed the defender, was heading toward the goal and had only the goalkeeper to beat.

• No other defender could have reached the attacker to challenge him.

• The attacker had the ball within his playing distance and under control (or would have if the defender hadn’t pulled him off it).

Despite all this, the foolish commentator spouts out that he didn’t agree with sending the player off ! He is Richard Broad, who was working for the Big Ten network. I wonder which of the above he disagreed with . . . based upon his years of experience refereeing at the highest level of course.

The referee is Rich Grady, who represented the United States as a FIFA referee a few years ago.

Historians tell us that in centuries past, some absolute rulers adopted a somewhat enlightened attitude to their vassals. Dictators they may have been, but benevolent ones who actually did some good things for their subjects. They were known as well, benevolent dictators or enlightened absolutists, and one of them, Emperor Joseph II of the Holy Roman Empire, described his reign as “Everything for the people, nothing by the people.” You may have seen a caricature of him in the movie “Amadeus”, when he pronounced that memorable advice: “Too many notes, Mozart, too many notes.”

Many observers will say that even today, centuries later, we have a benevolent dictator in our midst, and he runs world soccer. They refer to Joseph “Sepp” Blatter, the Swiss who runs the Federation Internationale Football Association (FIFA). Dictator he certainly is, trying to put his personal stamp on the world’s most popular game. Occasionally he is right, but too many times he comes across as a real numpty (a popular Scottish word to describe someone who embarrasses himself because of his own ignorance). Here’s a few of his best.

In 2004 he suggested that women players should have more feminine (read: skimpier) kit to increase the popularity of their game. That comment created uproar in the women’s game, needless to say. For the head of FIFA to suggest that players should be concerned about how they look, and not how they play, is the remark of a right numpty. Then he made himself look even more dumb when he added: “. . . they already have some different rules to men - such as playing with a lighter ball. That decision was taken to create a more female aesthetic, so why not do it in fashion?” (The ball is the same in men’s and women’s soccer.)

In the 2006 World Cup, after Australia were knocked out by Italy on a controversial late penalty-kick, he caused another brouhaha by publicly declaring that the penalty shouldn’t have been called. “I would like to apologize to our fans in Australia. The Socceroos should have gone into the quarter-finals in place of Italy . . .” This, from a man who never refereed at any decent level!

Not too many months later, in January of this year, he created more controversy when as a guest speaker on the eve of the election of a new president for UEFA, he came out and in his speech, publicly supported his long-time ally, Michel Platini, the great French midfielder. Would anyone in the audience dare to vote for the other candidate after that endorsement by the guy who controls the money? Conflict-of-interest rules apparently don’t apply when you are a dictator holding sway over 207 national associations which are members of FIFA. (The United Nations have only 192.) But his blathering didn’t stop there.

Somewhere he had developed the idea that for medical reasons it would be a good thing to ban matches at high altitude. That doesn’t affect many countries except some south American and Andean ones: Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, and the place where Mexico play difficult matches (Toluca). It didn’t matter to the enlightened despot that there is no medical evidence of danger in playing a soccer match at eight or nine thousand feet, and it was only after outrage from the countries concerned, that a month later, FIFA rescinded the ban.

Blatter was made to look even more foolish when to emphasize the silliness of the original decision, the President of Bolivia, Evo Morales, not only personally challenged the ruling in a meeting with FIFA’s caudillo, but traveled up to 6000 meters (almost 20,000 feet) with some of his staff and played a 15-minute game against some local mountain-dwellers. Morales scored the winning goal and also pronounced that “Wherever you can make love, you can play sports.” But for President Sepp, forced to back down, it was edictus interruptus.

It can’t be much fun being a dictator when no one listens to you. At least no one in the community you rule. Don’t they understand that I was making these suggestions for them? Don’t the women players want to be feminine and get sponsorship from cosmetic and lingerie companies? And why wouldn’t the Europeans want my friend Platini as their boss? I thought everyone would be happy that I supported the underdingos against the Italians, who have won the World Cup before, and it’s not fair for the Brazilians and Argentineans to climb mountains to play. Why don’t they love me and praise me?

Maybe the next thing to do is to take on a more powerful opponent, and show my people that I will protect them. I could imagine Sepp thinking that way, and sure enough, just over a week ago, he decided to take on nothing less than the entire European Union; not UEFA, but the EU itself. He must have thought that each member-nation in UEFA would agree that the most important part of soccer is the international match. If he protects the national teams, surely no one could object to that?

But most experts agree that the highest quality of play is not in internationals, but in international club play, or in national leagues, where the players are together week after week, perfecting their strategy and tactics. Blatter wants to reduce the number of foreign players on each team, for he thinks that that somehow will magically improve the quality of domestic players. “Blatter’s trying to protect the World Cup”, said Arsene Wenger, coach of Arsenal in the Premiership. “I’m trying to protect the quality of the game — they’re not the same thing.” Sometimes Wenger puts eleven foreigners on the field to represent his historic English club. “Do you really think that if I regularly started with five average English players, England would win the World Cup?”

Blatter’s foolishness lies not in his idea about foreigners, an idea which some writers agree with, because they are concerned that (for example) England haven’t been doing too well internationally since 1966. The fallacy in his thinking is that he can make the European Union give up one of the basic principles of its constitution: that labor is free to move about the continent. Fat chance! Blatter thinks that somehow soccer players are not like other employees, or maybe he admires the system in Major League Soccer, where the players sign contracts with the league, not individual clubs. Even Platini, his friend and protégé, thinks Blatter won’t win that fight.

Blatter, however, gave away his true motives for taking on the EU. “Football is strong enough to organize itself,” Blatter said, implying that labor laws should not apply to FIFA. He means that if the European Union backed down, he, the benevolent dictator, would be back in charge of all that he could see. No one in soccer could contradict him, for he and he alone knows what is best. And if you have any doubts about how the Swiss dictator operates, check here.

A popular word among the scribbling classes these days is schadenfreude, the German word for that evil little pleasure we take in someone else’s misfortune. There’s a lot of it going about in the political world, with Democrats delighting in one screw-up after another in the White House’s handling of events in Iraq, just as Republicans rejoiced in the raunchy revelations about Bill Clinton and his favorite intern.

Among spectators of sport there’s never a shortage of schadenfreude, whether secret or openly-displayed, for don’t some fans just love it when an obnoxious athlete gets caught cheating (Barry Bonds comes to mind), or when their envy of a soccer player’s success is soothed by his recurrent injuries that don’t allow him to perform (Beckham comes to mind)? Comeuppance for The Other is great medicine for our own ills.

Just think of poor Jose Mourinho (known to the soccer bloggers of Britain as “Maureen”). A few weeks ago he was near the top of the football world as coach of Chelsea F.C. In a little more than three seasons, he had won two Premier League titles, two League Cups, one FA Cup, one Community Shield and had reached late rounds in the European Championship. Management executives of The Blues (or The Pensioners, as they used to be called) described him as “the most successful manager the club has known”. He had no worries, mate.

Yet by Thursday, September 20, after what he admitted was the “most painful moment of my career”, he was gone. As Monty Python would have said, the coach was not pining, he had passed on, he was no more, he was off the twig, he had run down the curtain, joined the choir of coaches invisible, he was an ex-coach. He left with hard feelings and about twenty million dollars. As is the case in all divorces—and this was the mother of all divorces—Maureen’s relationship with the club-owner Roman Abramovich had broken down irrevocably.

Perhaps now, a mere two weeks later, he may be feeling a little better, because things have not gone too well for his successor as coach, Avran Grant. More to the point, the majority of Chelsea’s players were upset that Mourinho was forced out. Leaving the dressing-room for the last time, he gave hugs to 23 players, but not to John Terry, the captain, who had been an agent provocateur in the scheming and stabbing that went on behind Mourinho, nor to Andriy Shevchenko, the Ukrainian striker and former European footballer of the year, who hadn’t played as much as he thought he should. The captain and the striker got only a handshake that according to one observer “could have frozen a mug of tea”.

The ravenous British football press soon got after Grant, whose only success as a coach has been in Israel’s national league, not exactly a powerhouse in European football. Too much energy spent on war, and not enough on sport, perhaps. But it seems that Grant doesn’t have the coaching credentials required by UEFA for anyone taking over a professional top-flight club. Special dispensation will be needed for him to continue.

Then some of the Chelsea players piled in with remarks that Grant’s coaching techniques were 25 years behind the time, that he was an “idiot” and that his appointment to run the star-bright Chelsea team was a “disgrace”. For by then they had seen the new reality in the Stamford Bridge dressing-room, and they didn’t like what they saw . . .

On Tuesday evening, September 18, after the disappointing 1-1 draw with Rosenborg in the European Championship, but before Mourinho was forced out, a new authority appeared in the dressing-room to give instructions to Michael Essien, probably Africa’s finest midfielder. The man stood there with a clipboard lecturing Essien about the distribution of his passes: too many through the center and not enough to the wings. Though the words came out of the mouth of Shevchenko, acting as interpreter, they originated in the mind of the clipboard coach, the billionaire owner of Chelsea F.C., Roman Arkadyevich Abramovich.

So it is beginning to look as though Avram Grant may be Mourinho’s replacement in name only. Will Roman Abramovich run the team, since as one senior player said, he can push the Israeli around “without a hint of respect”?

The early results after the disappearance of Mourinho were not great, and the former boss could be forgiven for any public display of schadenfreude: defeat in Manchester, a draw with Fulham, a win against Hull of a lower division. The club still has difficulty putting the ball in the net, despite Grant and his playing of Abramovich’s favorite, Shevchenko.

Mourinho knows that running a top team is not easy, and he must be happy that Grant wasn’t able to suddenly revitalize the Blues. The win last Wednesday over Valencia in Spain in the European championship was, however, a good one, for that is the competition where the owner’s greatest ambitions lie. Avram Grant will be happy with that result. It might have saved his job.

Writers do like occasionally to slip an alien word into their texts. Perhaps merely an affectation, to the scribe it signals wordliness, linguistic erudition. Schadenfreude is one popular these days, but in this case it has an even more appropriate English equivalent, originating in the delight of spectators at watching the suffering in gladiatorial contests. It is “Roman Holiday”, like the one recently given to Jose Mourinho by well, you know.

By now you know the result: England 3 Israel 0. The consequences are myriad. Steve McClaren may feel more confident that he’s not going to be fired as manager next month; England supporters may feel that the team may yet qualify for the European championships next year; Michael Owen scored a beautiful goal, restoring faith that he is not yet finished; and Steve Gerrard played for sixty minutes without a painkilling jab in his big toe.

That last one is most important, because it was the best one for the player. And I daresay that the team doctors (my surgeon-daughter advises me) learned more about the healing of his big toe than they would have done if they had masked the pain. In fact, though you might think that seventy-one minutes was all Gerrard could give with a sore toe, it was not pain but cramp that caused him to be substituted. Because the toe had restricted the length and intensity of his training this last week, he couldn’t play full-pace for a whole game. And he will now be ready—unaided–for the next match on Wednesday, a tougher contest against Russia.

In an interview for the BBC, he was upbeat. “The toe is fine. All I had was a bit of cramp. I haven’t trained much for the last two or three weeks,” said Gerrard. “I will be a lot stronger on Wednesday for getting that 70 minutes in. The toe is healing well and that is behind me now. I didn’t need a painkiller.”

I was glad to hear that, for when I started watching professional soccer as a kid in the fifties, players were not treated very well by management. They had to play for a maximum wage, they could be transferred from club to club, whether they liked it or not, and some who wanted to move could be prevented from doing so by sheer nastiness, without any regard for the rights or unhappiness of the player.

Nowadays it is common for fans and pundits to complain about the amount of money players earn, about how they move from club to club for more money without thinking of the fans who come to see them. But in business, labor finds its own level of financial gain, whether the laborer be a soccer-player, an executive, an airline pilot or a plumber. They earn what they can, and sound contracts protect them from abuse, such as in the case of athletes, jabs before an important game.

Indiscriminate use of painkillers can damage a player and his future. So I for one am pleased Steve Gerrard played without a needle. I’d like to see them banned, just as other aids to performance are banned.

On Saturday England play Israel as part of the qualifying for the European championship in 2008. (I’ll pardon anyone who yawns at this point, since the result of the match must be a no-brainer, right?) What is there to write about such a contest: A Mediterranean Minnow trying to take on a Northern Pike? Eleven Premiership players against three? And those three not starters in the EPL?

But long before the kick-off at Wembley this weekend, another contest is being fought, and it is becoming seriously acrimonious by the hour. A contest between the managers of club and country, Rafael Benitez and Steve McClaren, in which the principal loser may be neither Liverpool nor England, but a player, midfielder Steven Gerrard.

Here’s how it started. On August 15, Gerrard played in the first leg of a Champion’s League match against Toulouse. Liverpool won 1-0, but the midfielder sustained an hairline fracture of the big toe of his right foot. A broken bone takes about six weeks to heal, but for Liverpool there was this upcoming match the following weekend: Liverpool against Chelsea. Gerrard is the engine of both Liverpool and England, but here he is in one of the biggest Premiership games of the year, and he can’t play. Or can he…?

Rafael Benitez decides that Stevie is too important to leave out of the Premiership match, and so lets him (encourages him to?) have a painkiller injection to allow him to play. Says Benitez: : “It’s not serious but we have to be careful. It’s not a big risk but we can push him and then he needs rest.” So with Gerrard playing, and after a controversial penalty-kick, for which the referee was given a week off, and after which Keith Hackett, the man in charge of referees, apologized to Liverpool, the match ends 1-1.

But the following week is a friendly match against Germany, and Benitez says that Gerrard will not play, because (and this is priceless!): “I now have to talk to [England coach] Steve McClaren, but he has to understand playing Steven for England will be a big risk for his future.” (Any hypocrisy there?) The reason is that in the meantime Benitez has learned that Gerrard took four days to recover from the effects of the first jab. He couldn’t train; no doubt the pain returned, and so Gerrard did not play.

Now we are running up to the crucial game against Israel, Gerrard desperately wants to play to inspire his mates into getting back into contention in the qualification for the European Chamionship, and someone has to make a decision about the broken toe. Benitez has decided that although “..it’s not serious..” yet playing for England can be “..a big risk for his future..”, Gerrard himself wants to play, and McClaren says: “He played with an injection against Chelsea two weeks ago. To get him on the pitch we will take whatever action it needs.” Oh, boy!

Gerrard was passed fit by McClaren after coming through a Friday training session unscathed. “He [Gerrard] has trained twice without an injection and if he plays tomorrow like he played this morning in training then everyone will be delighted,” said McClaren. “That’s the kind of performance that we need and it’s a big boost for everybody, most of all Stevie G because he desperately wants to play in this game. He came through it with no problems whatsoever.” But, there’s that previous statement: “To get him on the pitch we will take whatever action it needs.”

Neither McClaren nor Gerrard is a doctor, and neither (apparently) is aware that pain serves a purpose: to warn you that there is something wrong. To inject a painkiller defeats the body’s purpose, and risks aggravating the original injury. In Gerrard’s case, will the hairline fracture lengthen? Will the bone become displaced at another knock? Will the recovery time increase? For one game of David against Goliath, is England going to risk a player’s health?

In my book, Steven Gerrard should watch and cheer.

But in an interview with the newspaper The Sun, MacClaren summed up the situation thus: “He wants to play, I want him to play, the team does, the fans do. The country does. It’s a big game and we need big players. Stevie is one of them. Sometimes what the players want has to be taken into all the advice given from medical people and from managers. We will go a lot on Stevie G, on how he is feeling and what he wants. We will liaise with Liverpool and will do nothing that will put the player at risk. Asked if he had the ultimate power to decide whether or not Gerrard plays, McClaren replied: ‘Yes, I think I have.’”

Read between the lines of that statement, and it is clear that the Gerrard is a pawn to be moved as the real player (McClaren) sees fit. And yet sport is an activity in which the players are supposed to be the most important participants….

Today the announcement came that Gerrard will play. Can you imagine the conflict that will occur if Gerrard’s injury is aggravated by playing?

If David Beckham ever wondered what he was in for while playing for the L.A. Galaxy in Major League Soccer, he doesn’t have to wonder any longer. The game between Chivas USA and the L.A. Galaxy last Thursday told him more than he needed to know, about players, and more importantly, referees.

After hopping off the ‘plane from England, where he had played in a friendly international against Germany on Wednesday, the poor lad must have been tired. Two games in two days—no matter how enthusiastic and determined you are—will wear you down. And when you are tired, your mood isn’t always bright and cheerful if someone tries to take a piece of you.

And that happened just before half-time in the Chivas/Galaxy game, which was both scoreless and getting a little “chippy”, “niggly”, “nasty”, however you want to put it. At least that was what spectators, various members of the press, and Joe Machnik, director of officiating services for MLS thought, although the referee seemed oblivious. And then Jesse Marsch, a midfielder for Chivas, put some leather into Goldenballs, more literally than not.

Chasing after Beckham in the middle of the field, Marsch swung his right boot hip-high and kicked his opponent in the front of his pelvis, and from behind. Down went Beckham, but was as quickly up on his feet to charge straight at Marsch, until they were nose-to-nose snarling at each other like angry dogs, although wise enough not to bite.

The laws of the game are quite clear on this kind of challenge: “A tackle which endangers the safety of an opponent must be sanctioned as serious foul play.” (A player guilty of serious foul play must be sent off.)

As you can see from the LA Times photographthe high boot definitely endangers Beckham’s safety (!), especially since Marsch’s kick comes from behind his opponent and was delivered with the ball more than six feet away and unreachable. Take a look for yourself on the video of the incident.

And what was Marsch’s fatuous explanation for the nastiness? “He kind of got a piece of me the play before that and so it was somewhat of a retaliation, (and) somewhat of a tactical foul because he was on the break,” Marsch said in an AP report of the game. In other words, a younger and less-skilled player was going to show the superstar how tough he was! Beckham will see this kind of behavior again. Count on it.

Then comes the referee’s response: slow and inadequate. A yellow card that should have been red, and then two reds for players (one for each team, so as not to create an imbalance…) who were involved in the melee after the foul. In other words, the players knew how serious the foul was, but not the referee. In MLS, Beckham will see that kind of refereeing weakness again. Count on it.

During 1976-79, Rodney Marsh, another skillful midfielder from England, also came over to the U.S., where he played in the North American Soccer league (NASL) for Tampa Bay. He was asked recently by a journalist from the Mail in England what David Beckham could expect here. His pithy comments included this: “. . he won’t understand that the referees . . offer little protection from young men who will be looking to make a name for themselves at David’s expense.” Rod, how right you are!

I promise you that Beckham and his fans can expect more of this kind of stuff in the weeks to come, and also in the next few years, if US Soccer and MLS don’t sort out the refereeing.