True lies

One of the more cherished lies the English tell themselves is that they are good sports, they never cheat, 'just not cricket' and all that. This particularly manifests itself in football, a sport which has its fair share of gamesmanship and cheating - Maradona's Hand of God which beat the English in the 1986 World Cup maybe the most famous example.

The subtext in the way the media here treats cheating in sports is that it is those swarthy foreigners — greasy South Americans and garlic eating Continentals in particular — who will do anything to gain an advantage. Not our brave boys: we're honest and true. Which is, of course, self-delusional bullshit as anyone who has watched the English national team in recent years, particularly the stamping, poking and gouging thug John Terry and Wayne 'goes down quicker than George Michael' Rooney.

This past few days we've had a couple of examples of true English sportsmanship. In a game featuring Crystal Palace and Bristol City, a clear goal by Palace was not allowed because the referee and his three assistants were the only ones in the stadium who failed to see it. Palace lost 1-0, which sent boss Neil Warnock, who tends to bleat like a fishwife even when things are going well, into near apoplexy. He rightly called the Bristol City players and coach 'cheats' for not saying something to the referee.



Then on to rugby, which has seen Dean Richards the coach of Harlequins (which apparently is a Rugby Union team - as opposed to Rugby League, I am unsure of the difference, it's all just beefy men in short-shorts to me) banned for three years for making his players fake injuries to get fresh players on the field. These were 'blood injuries', so the players had concealed blood capsules in their socks, as if canon fodder extras in a Hollywood shoot 'em-up, to pop into their mouths at the opportune moment. But the brilliant thing is that Richards' mea culpa was anything but, sure he held his hands up but, it was farcical because "it didn't pan out particularly well on the day." So, it's not really cheating if it doesn't work, then?