How low will you go to win if put on the spot?
It wasn’t a penalty. The referee Danny Makkelie may have thought so at the time – and it certainly looked like one from 100 yards away at Wembley – but the replays showed that the decisive spot-kick Raheem Sterling won should never have been awarded.
How would we all be feeling today if the boot was on the other foot, if it had been the Danes who had benefited from a miscarriage of justice that had gone uncorrected by VAR and gone through? A little put out perhaps?
Football is a subjective pursuit. Any sport with a referee is. You win a few calls, you lose a few. England have endured their share of tough ones down the years – they did so in Wednesday’s semifinal with the Harry Kane penalty that never was.
But how far is pushing the rules acceptable in pursuit of victory? Is it the case that the more that is at stake the more malleable the rules become? Or should England operate to higher standards?
The proximity of a prize this big sets the moral compass spinning.
The Spanish newspaper Marca came up with the following assessment in the aftermath of the penalty incident yesterday: “English football can stop lecturing the rest of the continent about diving. Always going on about how frowned upon it is when a foreigner tries to trick the referee. In pure English football, it’s not done. Except in the semifinal of the Euros that is.”
To say Sterling dived would be incorrect. There was contact – and from two Danish defenders – as he drove towards goal.
But it was so slight that even at the lick Sterling was travelling at it is highly unlikely that the bumps would have caused him to go to ground as he did. He was, in football parlance, looking for the penalty.
Sterling’s fall was not grand theft on the Brink’s-Mat scale but had it happened in a kids’ game on a Sunday morning there would have been touchline mutterings, for sure. One of the joys of these Euros has been the short shrift extended by the officials to players trying to buy fouls.
Unintentional contact has been viewed as part of the game and the tournament has been all the better for it.
This was an exception.
Let’s get one thing straight. England deserved to win the semifinal. They were simply relentless. And Sterling, who has been outstanding all tournament, was close to unplayable for the Danes at times.
But there was a Nelson-like patch applied in much of the reaction that raised a valid question – to what degree are we ●Neil Diamond once explained that Sweet Caroline was about an 11-year-old girl riding a horse. England’s new unofficial anthem is nothing if not adaptable.
willing to turn a blind eye in order to win a trophy? A minority – who would presumably also give away a close relative to the Taliban and sacrifice the family pet to see the England captain lift the trophy – would go along with Kane punching a goal past Gianluigi Donnarumma if it meant ending the 55-year drought this weekend.
So how about a Sterling repeat in the final then? I think the majority of people would be OK with that if it meant England winning.
The English like to think they have an inherent sense of fair play, and that they play the game not the referee.
Let’s not kid ourselves.