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Posts Tagged ‘Seven Deadly Sins’

Peter Shilton was in England’s goal when Diego Maradona scored a goal with his hand for Argentina, effectively knocking England out of the 1986 World Cup

There are two ways of looking at it. On the one hand, after 20 years with the England team and 30 years playing at club level, I don’t particularly like being associated so frequently with an incident where the world’s greatest player cheated and got away with it. It was the referee and linesman’s fault really. However, since I stopped playing I have started doing a lot of corporate work and after-dinner speaking, so I do talk about the story a lot and I tell it in my own way. But that is the only benefit of it.

I remember it very well, I have to – its shown so often on TV. He would have been offside except the ball was miskicked towards goal by one of our players, Steve Hodge. Maradona knew he wasn’t getting it so he used his hand. The referee and linesman were entirely at fault and as far as I know the Tunisian ref, Ali Bin Nasser, never refereed again at such a high level.

It was a split-second decision. He was second best to the ball and I was just getting above him and reaching for the ball. I didnt see it or hear it but I knew the only way he could have made contact with the ball before me was with his hand. The reaction of everyone around me was the same – hands touching their arms, appealing to the referee.

I’ve never seen him since. I think I’d do a Terry Butcher and say little or nothing to him. The thing is he never officially said sorry. There was some sort of an apology last year, but that was more than 20 years too late. Instead of saying it was the hand of God he could have owned up to it, but he chose not to.

It wasn’t just me that was angry, it was the whole team. It was the first goal of the game and it came at a crucial time and it ended up putting us out of the World Cup at the quarter-final stage. If we had had television evidence who knows what would have happened? I couldn’t view it as clever. Even Gary Lineker, Mr Sportsman himself, has admitted he did it in one game. If a player was caught doing it today they might get a booking, but back then the only penalty would have been a free-kick, so why wouldn’t you try it?

• Peter Shilton was speaking at an event organised by England sponsors the Nationwide Building Society

For full story go to http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2009/may/19/seven-deadly-sins-football-shilton-maradona-hand-of-god

England’s inglorious penalty shoot-out history – a baffling hoodoo that to date involves losing on penalties several times to marginally superior opposition – didn’t begin at the 1990 World Cup semi-final against Germany (look away again, Stuart Pearce and Chris Waddle). In fact, it all started at the 1984 European Championship final. The women’s final, that is. And the original flukey victors were Swedes, not Germans.

The current national women’s team coach, Hope Powell, was a 17-year-old midfielder in the England squad that faced Sweden in the two-leg final of what was the first major women’s international competition.

A quarter of a century after the inauspicious day that saw England lose 4-3 on penalties to Sweden at Luton Town’s Kenilworth Road, Powell does not have the sharpest memory of the shoot-out.

“I can remember Linda Curl missing one of our penalties,” said Powell. “But I recall that mainly because she went ballistic in the showers after the game. She was the joker in the team and was just sending herself up – look away again, Euro 96 shoot-out culprit Gareth Southgate – but she didnt half make a racket.”

Curl, who a year earlier had hit 22 of the goals in an extraordinary 40-0 win for Norwich against Milton Keynes Reserves, took the first of England’s shoot-out penalties and saw it saved by the Sweden goalkeeper Elisabeth Leidinge, but at 2-2 the England goalkeeper Terry Wiseman kept out Helen Johansson’s shot. Lorraine Hanson then had her penalty saved, however, and though Kerry Davis converted England’s fifth spot-kick, Pia Sundhage – now Powell’s opposite number with the USA, the world’s top ranked womens team – scored the decisive penalty.

Powell watched from the halfway line of a rain-soaked Kenilworth Road pitch that she described as “absolutely shocking”, adding: “The ball kept getting stuck in the mud or pools of water and the penalty areas were very difficult.”

Powell never had to take an England spot-kick in a shoot-out situation, but she was watching from the sidelines as the national coach when England had their only shoot-out since that 1984 Euro final. In a play-off match at the 2005 Algarve Cup, Powell’s team drew 0-0 after extra time with China. The ensuing shoot-out (look away Alex Scott) was lost 5-3.

For full story go to http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2009/may/19/seven-deadly-sins-football-penalty-women-england

Liam Fray of indie band The Courteeners on why it’s not alright to barrack David Beckham

I was a ball-boy at United the season after they won the treble in 1999. I was 13 or 14, and one of the main scouts at the club worked at my secondary school. It was amazing. I did it for a full season and I got to see who were nice chaps and who weren’t very nice. David Beckham gave everything for us and would cover every single blade of grass. People will forget that when he’s done and say “oh yeah, he took a great free-kick”, but he was the hardest-working player I’ve seen, so committed to the cause. I don’t even think he wanted to leave. I think he was forced out.

If you want to know about wrath, I spent the first half of the season next to Alex Ferguson’s dug-out, and the second half of the season under the K Stand, under the old scoreboard. It was not their most successful season but we still won the league. I always used to get Gary Neville giving me shit. It was quite serious, if United were 1-0 down you didn’t want to feel the wrath of Fergie. My spot was literally next to theirs, so you could hear the things they were saying. Most of my mates are City fans, so I used go in wearing my tracksuit to school and stuff just to show off.

Around that time Beckham always used to get it playing for England. It was a real shame because he was so committed to his country. For the fans to give him grief and to say stuff about his children and his family, there comes a point where no matter how much you love your job there’s a line people should not cross. At Euro 2000, when Beckham had his shirt over his shoulder after the game against Portugal and there was his hand gestures to all the fans, I felt a real sense of pride for him. The chants can’t be excused whatever anyone says.

I’m not really an England fan, in fact the only England game I’ve seen was when we drew with Greece 2-2 and got through to the 2002 World Cup. It was amazing, what a game to choose. And Becks was the hero that day yet even then it was nearly so different for him.

For full story go to http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2009/may/18/david-beckham-argentina-seven-deadly-sins

The watershed, the moment of truth, the end of an illusion. You might call Hungary’s devastating 6-3 demolition of England at Wembley in November 1953 any or all of these. Never before had England lost at home to a foreign team. The Republic of Ireland team that won 2-0 at Everton, in 1949, may technically have been the first, but it consisted entirely of English league players.

The Hungarians had plainly been a force since they emerged from behind the Iron Curtain to win the Helsinki Olympic tournament in 1932. The blinkered insularity prevalent in England may be gauged from the fact that Frank Coles, the Daily Telegraph correspondent, asked himself how the Hungarians would fare against an English club team fighting for points in midwinter. His answer was that the English team would run through them!

In May, 1953, however, I was at the inaugural match of Rome’s Olympic Stadium, to watch the Hungarians take Italy apart, 3-0; and wrote a piece in a sports weekly warning what England would face the following November. The Hungarians played superb technical and tactical football, with Ferenc Puskas, a dominating captain with a formidable left foot, and Sander Kocsis, the so-called “Golden Head,” a double spearhead. Nandor Hidegkuti, destined to score three goals at Wembley, played behind them in the first half as a “deep” centre-forward. Jozsef Bozsik, the right-half, would surge into attack. Jozsef Zakarias, the left-half, played deep beside the centre-half, Mihaly Lantos. Laszlo Budai and Zoltan Czibor were effervescent wingers.

A fortnight before the England match, Sweden, under the little English coach, the Yorkshireman George Raynor, were holding Hungary to a draw in Budapest. The Swedish team had been unable to call on any of its foreign-based professionals. Raynor, however, had shrewdly appreciated what England’s tactically naive Walter Winterbottom had disastrously not; that it was Hidegkuti, in his deep-lying position, who made the Hungarian wheels turn. So he man-marked him in one half with his centre-forward, in the other with his inside-left and Sweden got a 2-2 draw.

Winterbottom before the Hungary game merely asked his designated centre-half, Harry Johnston, whether he wanted to man-mark Hidegkuti or stand off him, to which Johnston answered that he would stand off. All well and good had Winterbottom designated another player, probably a wing-half, to follow Hidegkuti, but he didn’t, with the result that Hidegkuti ran riot and scored three goals. The first of them came after 90 seconds, when, taking a free kick from the edge of the penalty box, his feint drew Johnston aside in the wall, whereupon Hidegkuti shot through the gap, to beat Gil Merrick, an erratic keeper that day.

Winterbottom remained in office for 16 years, such was the power of the Football Association secretary, his patron, Sir Stanley Rous. He survived not only the 6-3 debacle but an inconceivable 7-1 beating when the teams met again the following May in Budapest, where you might have thought that any half-decent manager would at least have devised a defensive strategy of damage limitation. But Winterbottom, a competent pre-war centre-half for Manchester United, unfairly sneered at by some England international veterans as one who had never played, was, in essence, a bureaucrat rather than a technician, who would admit his other job – yes, he had two! – as FA director of coaching was the more important of the two.

It should also be stressed that he was not even allowed to pick his own teams but had to play second fiddle to a so-called selection committee made up of football club directors.

Yet there were illusory moments. On 13 minutes, Johnston won a tackle, moved the ball upfield, found his Blackpool colleague, Stan Mortensen, who sent Jackie Sewell, the inside-right, dashing through to equalise. It was a false dawn. The Hungarians’ ball control and movement utterly surpassed England’s. A fierce drive by Hidegkuti made it 2-1 and, with Budai and Czibor now ready to drop back as well as drive forward on the flanks, other Hungarian goals were inevitable.

Puskas, a pseudo army officer with the Honved (army) club, as were most of the team but Hidegkuti, scored a memorable third, drawing the ball back with the sole of his left foot so that England’s captain Billy Wright, in the elegant words of the Times correspondent Geoffrey Green, “rushed past him like a fire engine going to the wrong fire.” Puskas duly scored.

But England were not playing badly; the attack could look direct and dangerous. Grosics, the Hungary keeper, made a gymnastic save. But Puskas got a fourth Hungarian goal from Bozsik’s free kick, before a fine solo by England’s Mortensen made it 2-4. But after half time, Bozsik made it five; then a doubtful free kick was awarded and Hidegkuti completed his hat-trick. England then got a late penalty, exploited by Ramsey, after Grosics had brought down George Robb: 6-3.

General panic ensued. Division 3 Watford brought their players in for extra afternoon training. We heard all about Hungary’s preparation, through a variety of sources. A book called Learn to Play the Hungarian Way had much currency. But by the 1958 World Cup Hungary were a merely modest side. All had depended on a clutch of great players emerging then vanishing. Brian Glanville

For full story go to http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2009/may/17/seven-deadly-sins-football-hungary-england