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Football
books seem to be all the rage these days. You can't log onto your
online bookstore without falling over the accumulated wisdom of
some of the beautiful game's least beautiful wordsmiths.
Wayne Rooney will tell you what he did on his summer holidays: "I
went to the World Cup. It was good. But I got detenshun becos I
stepped on sumbodys goolies. It's not fare."
Then there's Ashley Cole, presumably down to his last pair of diamante
earrings and having to augment his income with his writing, bemoaning
the fact that Arsenal wouldn't give him a paltry £5,000 extra
per week: "Ooooh, I've never been so insulted. I could have
scratched their eyes out."
And there's more to come. Big John Hartson's memoirs hit the shelf
next month - that's not going to be a slim volume - while Michael
Owen will doubtless spend his down time penning the 3rd - or is
it the 5th - autobiography of his career.
But where's the real blockbuster that we all want to read, a book
from the great Sepp Blatter, King of FIFA?
Just like "Harry Potter", it'll come in two versions.
The first will be of biblical proportions, called "The Thoughts
of Sepp Blatter".
Then there'll be a pamphlet, "The Intelligent Thoughts of Sepp
Blatter".
Not for nothing did one German journalist once say, "Sepp has
50 ideas before breakfast and 51 of them are bad".
This, of course, is the man who brought us perennial favourites
such as, "There should be a united Great Britain team".
Are you sure pal?
You want to try running that one past a group of nations that hate
one another once again please? Why not get the Former Yugoslavia's
constituent parts to join up again for an encore maybe?
Then there's his wish to eradicate draws from the game. Or the idea
that we could have two referees, one in each half of the pitch,
an idea thrown out as too stupid to persist with about 120 years
ago.
Or maybe we could have bigger goals so that it's easier to score?
And then there's his plan to make women's football more popular
- wearing skimpy kit (that one's going in the pamphlet by the way).
But his latest brainwave gets the biscuit as the most stupid yet.
Reflecting on the World Cup just gone, Sepp hasn't turned his mind
to the negative performances of too many teams and ways of remedying
that, if such a possibility exists. Instead, Sepp has expressed
his despair that the World Cup ended with a red card.
In fact, it didn't. It ended with a penalty, but perhaps Blatter
was so distraught at Zinedine Zidane's dismissal that his vision
was blurred by tears and he missed everything else that went on
afterwards. Italy won, in case you haven't heard Sepp.
But so upset is our Sepp, that he wants Zidane and Materazzi to
get together and settle their differences. He hasn't noticed that
both of them now seem little bothered by the incident, both of them
seem to have moved on, and the rest of the world has long since
put the incidentto bed.
But Sepp, who clearly has designs of taking over from Kofi Annan
before long, has decreed that some symbolic moment of reconciliation
must take place to show an example to the rest of the world. I'm
sure that Osama Bin Laden, George W. Bush, Tony Blair will all be
moved by such a gesture, look deep into their hearts and then continue
to blow the living daylights out of one another as a consequence.
Cunningly, Sepp has seen this, and so he's going for broke by ramping
up the melodrama and planning that the meeting will take place on
Robben Island. No, nothing to do with eliminating diving from the
game at the same time, but a pilgrimage to the place where Nelson
Mandela was incarcerated by the South African authorities in the
grim days of apartheid.
How fitting. A couple of overblown primadonnas burying the hatchet
on their same plot of land as a man who spent years in jail as part
of the struggle to overthrow a grotesque and twisted form of evil
government that suppressed the huge majority of a nation's population,
a nation that still bears the scars.
The parallels are so obvious, the suffering of Zidane and Materazzi
so similar to that of Mandela and his people that I'm stunned we
didn't all see it before. But then it takes a man of vision to spot
such a desperate need doesn't it?
After all, simplicity truly is genius and they don't come any simpler
than Sepp.
Here's a fresh idea for the FIFA man. Pop over to Robben Island
yourself, find Nelson's cell and sit in there. Stay for a while.
Maybe 27 years. Don't contact the outside world. And you know what?
By the time you come out, football will be a much better game.
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