Compiled by PHIIP REID
Keane's conduct shows up Tevez
DOES ANYONE else get a sick feeling in the stomach when you see how much Carlos Tevez has lost – some €11 million – in wages, bonuses and fines since turning up his nose to the manager?
Is it the amount of money alone that beggars belief? Or is it the fact that, in these austere times when countless millions around Europe are wondering where the next cent is coming from, that someone so talented can decide that he is bigger than everyone else?
Despite their exit to Liverpool in the English League Cup in midweek, Manchester City’s position at the top of the English Premiership suggests that life can indeed go on with or without Senor Tevez. And, although you might wonder at the amount of money that City – or Abu Dhabi City as they have been nicknamed – have thrown about in the transfer market to assemble a title-chasing team, you also have to hail them on this occasion for standing up to Tevez.
Indeed, the stay-at-home stance adopted by Tevez is in stark contrast to that taken by Robbie Keane, who has shown himself to be a thorough professional in the manner in which he has made the move to Aston Villa on loan from LA Galaxy. Not only is he scoring winning (and spectacular) goals, he has the class not to celebrate them when they come against former clubs. Tevez could learn a thing or two from Keane’s attitude.
And, if there were those who wondered if Keane’s return to the Premiership was to do simply with money, given that it was the 10th transfer of his career, the fact is that it can only be good for the Republic in the build-up to the Euro 2012 finals. He looks sharp and fit. Let’s keep it that way into the summer.
You'd swear commentating is easier said than done
LET’S BE honest. Everyone fancies themselves as a sports commentator – after all, what could be easier than sitting pitchside, courtside or ringside with a microphone in your hand and relaying all the action to listening ears?
Ah, easier said than done. One of the latest to discover that commentary is an art form was former international boxing judge Chuck Giampa, who retired from the ring to embark on a new life as a TV pundit. In officiating at over 100 world title fights, Giampa’s new employers obviously thought their newly recruited expert would bring a whole new angle to boxing commentary. He did, but for all the wrong reasons.
When introduced to viewers for the first time last week, Giampa remarked: “Tonight I will be taking you inside the mind of a judge.” Then, he froze, repeated his opening line, and froze again
. . . and his on-air brainfreeze seemed to confirm previous assessments of boxing aficionados that his often controversial scoring, at bouts including Bernard Hopkins v Joe Calzaghe or Floyd Mayweather v Oscar de la Hoya, were of someone with very little going on between the ears!
To compound matters, Giampa then proceeded to utter a profanity when the rehearsed words stubbornly refused to make their way from his brain to his mouth. Anyway, poor old Chuck is not alone when it comes to on-air gaffes . . . with British commentator David Coleman – of Colemanballs fame – renown for his various on-air utterances including such as, “That’s the fastest time ever run – but it’s not as fast as the world record.” Or: “Don’t tell those coming in the final result of that fantastic match, but let’s just have another look at Italy’s winning goal.”
Or: “He’s got his hands on his knees and holds his head in despair.”
And just because you have been there and done that at a high sporting level doesn’t give anyone a divine right to preaching.
Take Trevor Brooking’s assessment of an international between Northern Ireland and England.
“That’s football, Mike. Northern Ireland have had several chances and haven’t scored but England have had no chances and scored twice.” Go figure!
Barrichello set to test for IndyCar team in Florida
PROMISES, it seems, are made to be broken.
Veteran Formula One driver Rubens Barrichello – who has been replaced at Williams by his compatriot Bruno Senna – promised his wife in the past that he would never race on the American oval tracks.
Maybe he will be as good as his word.
However, word from from the KV Racing Technology IndyCar team in Florida is that 39-year-old Brazilian, the most experienced driver in Formula One history, will test drive the team’s car in trials next week.
Hoping noble gestures will make a difference
THE DEBATE on ethics in sport is an old chestnut, and one that seems to get spikier in an Olympics year. Cue this week. Meredith Alexander, a member of a body overseeing the sustainability of the London Olympics, decided – live on BBC’s current affairs programme Newsnight, as it happened – that the time was ripe for her to make a statement: she resigned her position on the commission in protest at a sponsorship deal with Dow Chemicals because of the US company’s ties to the 1984 Bhopal gas disaster that killed thousands in India.
Alexander’s stance is obviously one of principle, coming on the back of the games organisers selecting Dow to make the hundreds of plastic panels to decorate the outside of the main Olympic stadium in London.
As in sport, it is all about timing; and Alexander’s pre-emptive strike, whether you agree with her, provided a voice for those activists in India looking for greater levels of compensation for victims of the gas disaster.
Does it matter, though, that Dow didn’t own the chemical plant at the time of the incident? Not to the protester it doesn’t. Alexander called it a “toxic legacy,” adding: “It is appalling that 27 years on, the site has still not been cleaned up and thousands upon thousands of people are still suffering.”
Alexander has made her point, in a soft way. In fact, come the end of the Games in August, it is doubtful if many will remember her grand gesture. But, then, better to make it now – in January when news is not as plentiful – than to do so in the midst of the year’s great sporting contest when the serious business of claiming medals will override most moral arguments.
We all know the old argument about the Olympics, that it is not the winning but the taking part that counts. Yeah. Sure. When Baron Pierre de Coubertin put forward the theory that “the essential thing in life is not conquering but fighting well”, he was speaking of a different time. Mostly, though, people seem most interested in the medallists.
Still, down through the years, we’ve had any number of noble gestures from medallists. Most of them are what’s known as soft ways: the African-American athletes who gave the black power salute at the Olympic Games in Mexico in 1968; Canadian canoeist Alwyn Morris – a descendant of the Mohawk tribe – raising an eagle feather at the Los Angeles Games in 1984. In their own way, they raised human rights. The harder gestures were the boycotts, principally the African-led boycott of the 1976 Olympics in Montreal and then the tit-for-tat boycotting of 1980 Olympics in Moscow (when 65 countries, led by the USA, stayed away in protest at the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan) and the 1984 Games in LA (when 15 Eastern Bloc states boycotted in reprisal).
Boycotts are an important strategic means of opposing systemic patterns of gross human rights. Their use in a sporting context, though, is moot. Did the 65 countries staying away from the Moscow Games do anything for those living in Afghanistan? Hardly. But, against that, the Tanzania-led boycotting of Montreal could be said to have contributed to the growing worldwide aversion to apartheid in South Africa.
Indeed, the stronger argument is that sport can advance human rights. It can be a vehicle to lift people out of poverty. It provides self-esteem and a chance to be recognised as someone with skills and abilities.
In this year’s Games in London, we’ll see athletes from around the world climbing onto medal podiums and, in many cases, there will be stories of personal sacrifice and overcoming unjust regimes in their homelands to have achieved their life’s dream. Many will inspire their compatriots.
By then, the stance Alexander has taken on the Bophal issue will be long forgotten, you suspect. But at least she has stood by her ethics. At least she has got people thinking. For the moment.
GAA deal highlights progress
IT SEEMS like an aeon when men like Jimmy Keaveney were arguing the case for some sort of Gaelic players’ body to represent the interests of those who donned a jersey and went out onto the field for the honour and the glory.
You’ve got to feel that the body that subsequently evolved, the Gaelic Players Association, could only be accessed by the wildest figment of Keaveney’s imagination. So, hats off to Dessie Farrell and co for the manner in which they have taken the GPA into the mainstream of the GAA. Further proof of the GPA’s onwards-and-upwards graph came with the GAA and GPA’s first official joint-sponsorship deal with Price Waterhouse Coopers. That the deal, over three years, should be with a blue-chip company like PWC speaks volumes for the progress made by the GPA.
