The show must go on

Foul Play always welcomes an opportunity to bash the little grey men of UEFA as eagerly as the next man, but one can’t help feeling that there was something unseemly about the haste with which the media rushed to clobber them for their decision to allow the Champions League matches of September 11 to go ahead that night, in the wake of events on the east coast of America.

You may remember that UEFA got it in the neck for allowing the day’s matches to go ahead while moving swiftly to postpone the following night’s fixtures. Now, I don’t have a copy of the timescale of the terrorist attacks to hand at the moment, but if memory serves, both towers of the World Trade Center had fallen down by about 10.45am New York time, or 3.45pm our time. The football was supposed to kick off four hours later, which makes the logistics of cancelling eight Champions League matches on such short notice all but impossible.

I am not arguing, by the way, that the matches should have gone ahead so that we “don’t let the terrorists win”. Scrap the matches as a mark of respect by all means; after all, cancelling a few football matches hardly represents a waving of the white flag to the forces of Islamic fundamentalism.

What I am saying is that in terms of security issues and logistics, it was utterly unrealistic and unfair to expect UEFA to be able to cancel the evening’s games at four hours’ notice.

For what it’s worth, there were some decidedly strange results on the night in question, suggesting that more than a few of the teams in action didn’t have their minds on the job at all.

Liverpool, playing Boavista in an atmosphere more akin to a memorial service, before a half-empty Anfield, got only a 1-1 draw. Schalke 04, the second best side in Germany, lost 2-0 at home to an average Panathinaikos team, while PSV Eindhoven were stuffed 4-1 by Nantes (and then had the unbelievable bad taste to ask UEFA for a replay).

Should the authorities also have shelved the Premiership programme of the weekend before last? A definite “maybe”. It’s not being insensitive to argue that the football should have gone ahead, and it is not being hypersensitive to argue for its postponement as a mark of respect. Both standpoints are valid.

I personally subscribe to the view that the sport I watched over the weekend of September 15-16 (Premiership highlights, Dundee v Celtic, the F1 Grand Prix, and some German football on Sky) performed an invaluable function by serving to briefly take my mind off what had happened in America.

After a solid four days of watching coverage of the attacks on Sky and BBC News 24, my head had begun to ache like a bastard. Not because I was bored with what I was viewing; merely because I had watched far too much of it at that stage, and that there was no more room in my mind for any more. It was literally too much to take in.

After four or five days of that, the desire to watch something else, whether it be the Premiership, or Seinfeld, or Sex And The City, is not only normal but positively healthy, and should be encouraged. It certainly doesn’t mean that you are indifferent to what went on in America.

Before I forget, can we just address the stupid and nonsensical suggestion in one or two newspapers that Roy Keane’s sending-off at Newcastle somehow irreversibly tarnished the minute’s silences that had preceded all the day’s Premiership fixtures?

The core of this premise was that Keane had horribly besmirched the memory of the terrorist victims by not being able to behave himself on such a sensitive day. Curiously, the four or five lower-division players who got red-carded the same afternoon escaped similar criticism.

Leaving aside the fact that Keane’s fate was sealed as soon as he raised his fist, and the small but vital detail that the best replay angle on ITV clearly showed Shearer giving him a surreptitious poke in the eyes, the only thing he was guilty of was utter foolishness, for allowing himself to be wound up by a transparent gamesmanship merchant like the perennially unappealing Newcastle captain.

The sanctimonious hacks who accused Keane of “dragging the game into the gutter” by choosing that particular day to get sent off are engaging in opportunistic and cheap point-scoring. Was the Premiership supposed to be an aggression-free zone for the day?