Well, unless my understanding of the rules is way off, I didn’t find them to be in bad shape at all. That’s as things stand today of course, there’s a lot of transfer window left, but they’ll have a pretty good idea who they’ll be willing to sacrifice if they bring in new players that take them outside the scope of the rules.

Quick recap of the rules for the purpose of this analysis: clubs can use as many players under the age of 21 on January 1st 2010 as they like, regardless of nationality. Clubs must name a squad of up to 25 players who are aged 21 or over on January 1st and within that squad, no more than 17 are allowed to be not “Home Grown”. Logically, that means that a squad of 25 will contain at least 8 home grown players, but it’s frequently misunderstood that clubs have to name 8 home grown players. They do not.

I’ve gone through the Man City squad as listed on their official website (their player section, in keeping with the rest of the website, is excellent by the way) and classified each player into one of 3 groups as shown in the table below; Under 21 (yellow), Over 21 – Not Home Grown (Red) and Over 21 – Home Grown (Green).

The only exception in this table is Gunnar Nielsen. You’ll remember him I’m sure, he was the goalkeeper who was deemed not good enough for the Premiership just before our visit to Eastlands and City were given special permission to sign a keeper on emergency loan to replace him. He’s just signed an extension to his contract and will be going to Tranmere on a season long loan.

As you’ll see from the table (you can click for a full sized version), City currently list 6 players who are under 21. They have 31 players who are over 21; 16 are not home grown and 15 are home grown. Therefore, they’re inside the maximum number of players who are not home grown and over the minimum required number of home grown players. They simply have 6 more than the maximum 25 players aged over 21.

City could easily let some of their younger players such as Logan, Etuhu, Johnson, Caicedo and Jô go out on long term loans or restrict them to domestic and European cup competitions. (The Europa League has similar 25-man squad rules, but there’s no reason why the two squad lists have to be identical). With Gonzales likely to be 4th choice keeper, he’ll probably be used in the reserves only.

There’s six players off the list right there, leaving a 25 man squad of 13 not home grown and 12 home grown players. Well within the rules.

Of course, as I’ve already mentioned, the situation is extremely fluid, more players will be arriving at and departing from Eastlands. The point though, as it stands, is that City most certainly do not have to “offload” a dozen or so players to meet the requirements of the new home grown rule, which is the claim I keep bumping into lately.

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Actually, the introspection part is just wishful thinking on my part. Far more likely: hand wringing, gnashing of teeth, finger pointing, talk of reform, grass roots etc., but in 4 years time and again, to a lesser degree, in 4 years, we’ll almost certainly repeat the same cycle.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat. All fueled by the feckless tabloid media playing to the lowest common denominator and its readership lapping it up.

We English have a disease. It’s a disease of living on past glories, with scant recognition of the realities around us, and the vain belief that any shortcomings can be resolved in short measure, without any great understanding of what those shortcomings are. Come Brazil in 2014, we’ll doubtless be talking about “48 years of hurt”, but still not a damned tangible action put in place to correct the long term direction of English football.

It’s a disease of ignorance.

Many Villa fans are far from immune to this disease at club level and are still living in 1982, labouring under the misapprehension that throwing countless millions at the transfer market is all that needs to be done to catch up with likes of Man Utd.

Ignorance.

There are countless blogs and forums out there which do little more than attach themselves to the tabloid media like leaches, echoing the baseless speculation, pontificating on which they think might be credible and which are rubbish based on nothing more than what they wish to be true or false. They add absolutely nothing original, nothing insightful, nothing thoughtful. And the readers lap it up. That’s what they want. News of the screws and WAGs of course. Lots of WAGs.

Ignorance.

But there is some light at the end of the tunnel, a growing movement of sorts. Fantastic football writers do exist, both in the mainstream and within the blogosphere and they’re increasingly finding new ways to get their message out. Thankfully, the level of TV punditry has received a chorus of criticism during this tournament. This Scotsman article has been picked up frequently and is a fantastic example of calling out the broadcasters’ mind blowing level of arrogance at their own ineptness, but is by no means the only example:-

The Beeb got carpeted by some viewers for their treatment of that Algeria game. So what happened before the kick-off in yesterday’s lunch-time match between New Zealand and Slovakia? In a six-and-a-half minute introduction just one player out of the 22 on show was given a name-check, and here is how it happened.

Lee Dixon: “Slovakia have got some decent players, Hamsik, the pick of them. Young player, plays on the left side.”

Gary Lineker: “He’s at Napoli.”

Lee Dixon: “That’s right.”

Alan Hansen (chuckling): “Somebody gave you him, by the way.”

What Hansen meant, I think, was that his colleagues must have been fed the Hamsik reference by another party, that they couldn’t have come up with his name all by themselves. It’s not like Dixon or Lineker produced a dossier of facts about Hamsik, a file of information on who he is and where he has been. All they did was mention his name and the fact that he was rather good. That was it. Hansen seemed to think this was worthy of a gently-mocking put-down, as if the other two were some kind of class swots. As such, he was almost revelling in his own ignorance.

This is just a perfect example of the level of ignorance that permeates the English game at every level. These “experts” are nothing of the sort and the audience is deemed so clueless that they can literally be laughed at, right in their faces. Unless this kind of lazy, second rate punditry is rejected as unacceptable, as insulting to its audience, they will turn out to be quite right to laugh at us. Laughing all the way to the bank as it happens.

Is this the sole reason for England’s abject failure? No, of course not, it’s not even the root cause, but until we recognise that as a nation, we’re just not that good, how can we hope to fix it? How can we recognise that we’re not as good as other countries if every 4 years we whip ourselves into a frenzy with the false belief that we’ll beat the other teams based on absolutely nothing more than blind faith and the “knowledge” that the Premiership is “the best league in the world”?

Innit?

Unsurprisingly, I’ve already read knee jerk reactionary rubbish that we’ve all read time and again in response to the latest England disappointment. There are too many foreigners in the Premier League stymieing the development of English youth. Foreign management. Too much money. Yada, yada, yada.

I’m sorry, those are symptoms of the problem, not the cause. Attacking those issues is tantamount to sticking a plaster over a deep gash. What we need to do is understand what is fundamentally wrong with our game at a technical level and realise that fixing it won’t happen in time for Brazil 2014.

Or 2018.

The cream will always rise to the top and when we seek to develop and reward strong coaching and management skills, we’ll get the English managers we deserve. Similarly, when we foster technical skills and an understanding of the game among our youth, we’ll get the players we deserve. You reap what you sow. The fact is, top English players tend to cost more than their foreign counterparts in the transfer market because there are less of them. It’s the simple economics of supply and demand.

Symptoms and cause. Create an army of strong, technically proficient youngsters, tutored by strong, technically proficient coaches and you’ll flood the market with cheap talent, and the best will get their chance, making foreigners superfluous. Attack the problem from the other end, by introducing limits on the number of foreigners in the league, forcing the inclusion of substandard domestic players and all you do is dilute the overall quality of the league. How on earth that is supposed to help the national team, I can’t possibly fathom.

So, the key for me, as with many things in life, is education. We need to put a massive emphasis on equipping our coaches and managers with the skills and knowledge they need to develop quality young players. (If I see another club asking for special permission to put an unqualified ex-player in charge of coaching the team, I think my head will explode, I don’t care how popular they are). We need to educate those players with the technical skills they need to perform at the top level and, this is arguably the most important element, we need to educate ourselves about the global game. We need to reject shoddy punditry and journalism and promote quality.

We vote with our wallets. As long as we purchase tabloid garbage, they’ll keep producing it. As long as we dress their rumours and speculation up as news and argue about it on blogs and in forums, they’ll keep producing it. As long as we subscribe to the uninformed, jingoistic flag waving, we’ll keep believing that we’ll win the next World Cup. As long as we accept the TV companies wheeling out know-nothing “McExperts”, we’ll swallow their hackneyed, cliched rubbish.

As Mahatma Gandhi said, “We must be the change we wish to see in the world”. Indeed. Until we truly recognise what the real problems are, and that we are all part of those problems and, equally, can be part of the solution, we’re doomed to repeat our failures.

Over and over and over and over and…

Time to wake up. The solution is not going to be quick. It’s not going to be easy either.

One final thought: England wheeled in one of the tournament’s oldest squads, a “golden generation” apparently, full of expectation. By contrast, the Germans brought one of the youngest, but, crucially, expectation was low and it’s understood that the national team are currently in a period of transition. I look outside of our “golden generation” and I’m not really sure who the next Gerrard or Lampard is. The thought that the next Messi, or even Özil, could be English is simply ludicrous.

And even if he did exist, who’s going to coach him? Alan Shearer?

Outlook: Grim.

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• England Dumped Out Of European U-19s By Dominant Spain

Oh, and if you missed it, the Socceroo video is definitely worth a minute of your time.

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And so it turned it out. England looked overly rigid and drilled to me. They all appeared to know what they should be doing, but weren’t altogether comfortable doing it. It reminded me a little of someone learning to dance and counting the steps out loud as the moved. 1-and-2-and-3-and-4, 1-and-2-and-3-and-and-4.

No? Just me then.

Defensively, they backed off and gave Mexico the space to play in front of them and going forward they were riddled with errors and lacked any real bite or cohesion.

Milner, for his part, didn’t see a whole lot of the ball during the early phases, but when he did have it, he was intelligent and assured with his passing. That alone was enough to stand him some way above Michael Carrick who wasn’t making the most of his opportunity to say the least. Apparently Carrick won 0% of the tackles he attempted last night; an appalling statistic for a player known as a defensive midfielder.

As England struggled to get any kind of traction in the game Capello strided into his technical area and promptly adopted his wonky buffalo stance, which everyone should know means he isn’t overly impressed. He looked frustrated, Gerrard looked frustrated, Rooney looked extremely pissed off.

Capello made a sensible switch and asked Gerrard to push into the middle more and Rooney moved to the left to try to win some possession with a 5 man midfield. Although it was still somewhat against the run of play, the change paid dividends when England opened the scoring thanks to some age defying reactions from Ledley King who nodded in Crouch’s smart header back across goal from Gerrard’s corner.

England doubled their lead within 20 minutes with Peter Crouch extending his fabulous England scoring record while simultaneously proving that they do indeed all count. Offside. Handball. Take your pick, but neither were spotted and it was 2-0 England, a scoreline they certainly didn’t deserve on the run of play and literally didn’t deserve on its technical merits.

Carlos Vela did Rob Green’s confidence no harm with a couple of great breaks that should have led to a goal but for less than brilliant final efforts. Not bad, but the fodder that goalkeepers will eat up all day long and be boasting about in the players’ bar after the game.

Mexico got no less than they deserved with a goal that frankly had something of the ‘bundle’ about it just before half time. Leighton Baines at the heart of it and that summed up a disappointing audition for the Everton left back. If Stephen Warnock can get some time on the pitch against Japan at the end of the month and at least do a half decent impression of a professional footballer then surely he must be worthy of the 2nd string left back spot on the plane to South Africa?

Second Half

Capello rang a few changes at half time which included switching Milner to the left wing where he looked far more comfortable without the constraints of the instructions he was clearly playing under in the middle. Being separated from Carrick’s ineptitude didn’t hurt either.

I’ll be honest, I lost a bit of interest in the second half. Glen Johnson did a fantastic Lionel Messi impression early on by cutting in from the right before unleashing a quite exquisite left foot effort that sailed into the top corner to make it 3-1. He may well have surprised himself, he certainly surprised everyone watching.

After that, it was cruise control for as much as I actually paid attention to and the game finished at 3-1. I had the Canada vs Argentina friendly on another screen and the sight of Maradona wobbling around his technical area celebrating each of their 5 goals was far more entertaining.

The good news is that Mexico are no mugs and we comfortably beat them despite missing several first choice players and rarely showed any sign that there even was a second gear. There’s different dynamics involved, but Mexico frequently more than have the measure of our June 12th opponents; USA.

However, there were quite a few performances last night that if repeated during the World Cup will result in nothing but failure for England. Especially against the US, but even against Algeria and Slovenia.

On the other hand, England are notoriously slow starters and even if we lumber though the group stage, I’d back us to be hitting our stride at the right time in the knock out phase.

For James Milner; he’s a dead cert to be on the plane, no question about it, even though I don’t think he did anything in particular to advance his cause last night. Neither Heskey or Warnock saw any time on the pitch, but that probably only bodes ill for one of them. We shall see.

[Photo: Daylife]

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Besides the Premiership link, the game also featured ex-Villan Peter Whittingham, who has been one of Cardiff’s key players over the last couple of seasons, and also our very own Barry Bannan got a run out for Blackpool in the last couple of minutes.

This was the match recently christened “the £90m game” since that’s the estimated amount of earnings almost certainly heading the winner’s direction over the next few years thanks to the newly increased parachute payments.

I imagine quite a few fans will be looking for Blackpool away when the fixtures are published!

So, we now know the 20 teams who will contest the 2010/11 English Premier League: Arsenal, Aston Villa, Birmingham, Blackburn, Blackpool, Bolton, Chelsea, Everton, Fulham, Liverpool, Man City, Man Utd, Newcastle, Stoke, Sunderland, Tottenham, West Brom, West Ham, Wigan and Wolves.

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• Like Most Things, Position Is Relative

I bet the execs at Nike were thrilled when Dunga left Ronaldinho out of Brazil’s squad though!

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But a funny thing happened; Barcelona lost 3-1.

That’s not what is intriguing me and causing this little venture from the well trodden Villa path today though. What grabbed my attention is that Mourinho’s side won the game with just 33% of the possession. They won the game by connecting just 158 passes to Barcelona’s 521. That’s a 23% share of the completed passes in the game. I’ve checked. There’s been just two matches in the last 4 seasons that Aston Villa had had a lower CPS in a game:-

• 20% – 26th December ‘07 – Chelsea 4 Aston Villa 4
• 22% – 28th October ‘06 – Liverpool 3 Aston Villa 1

The official Man of the Match; Wesley Sneijder, besides scoring Inter’s crucial equaliser, completed just 10 of the 26 passes he attempted during the course of the match. That’s a 38% completion rate that would make Reo-Coker wince.

30% of Inter’s attempted passes, compared to 14% of Barcelona’s, were classified as “long passes” and those passes had a completion rate of just 36% while Barcelona completed 71% of their long passes. Shhhh, don’t tell Arsene Wenger this though, he’ll call them a long ball team.

Inter’s total pass completion rate was just 58%. Barcelona hooked up 82% of the 636 passes they attempted.

So what?

We beat Liverpool, Chelsea and Man Utd this season with a similar share of possession and although we managed a greater share of the passing game than Inter did against Barcelona, we were far inferior by that measure too.

Could it be that organisation and team spirit go an awful long way? Could it be that a team can truly be greater than the sum of its parts? I believe that is the case and it’s one of the most important qualities MON was looking for when he was assembling the components of this team in my opinion. I sometimes see people lambaste that as if it’s a bad thing. It isn’t. It wins games.

And one final thought on the subject of bringing in the right players at the right time. Last summer there was the usual crying about lack of transfer activity and speculation about a shortage of funds. General Krulak tried to calm fears by insisting that if MON wanted to purchase a player for £30m, he could, the money would be there. Of course, that was twisted into some kind of promise of a £30m player which never materialised, leaving a lot of rattles laying on the ground beside the prams.

One of the names being banded around was a certain Wesley Sneijder. So, let’s get some perspective here people: last night Mr Sneijder was the Man of the Match against Barcelona in the San Siro. Tonight, we run out on the pitch at KC Stadium in Hull. No disrespect to Hull City or the people that live there, but come on!

Incidentally, if we win in Hull tonight, the 3 points will take us to 1,000 points to date in the Premiership. We’ll be only the fifth team to reach that milestone, you already know who the first four were. That will be quite an achievement and interesting to note that 233 of those points will have been earned under Martin O’Neill.

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Damian launched a new website today, he’s called it Aston Villa Central and you can find it at astonvillacentral.co.uk. There you’ll find links to lots of other Aston Villa websites. See what he did there? Aston Villa Central, get it? (He has actually been calling his links page Aston Villa Central for some time, but has now decided to go a bit further)

Oddly enough, you won’t find a link to Aston Villa Central at Aston Villa Central. Oh, this is confusing, isn’t it? I meant that Dugdale seems to have omitted the original .com website, this one, from his new .co.uk site. Funny, that.

Similarly, I won’t be linking to that site or any other site belonging to Damian Dugdale. I won’t be linking to thevillablog.co.uk, astonvillawallpapers.com, avfcforum.co.uk or avfcblog.com, the domain that he “sold” to Ole Ole for $60,000. He still owns that domain, but they have all that quality content so I think it’s fair to assume that he didn’t give them their money back. He got to keep all the old links though, which are vitally important to someone as SEO driven as Dugdale.

I also won’t be linking to astonvillaviews.com either, a domain that redirects to a page where he displays the content of reader submissions to his blog. It’s actually ironic that most of those submissions are, I suspect, sent in by intelligent, rational people looking to provide balance to the negative nonsense that Dugdale drip feeds day after day.

Why is it ironic? Well it’s eerily similar to astonvilla-views.com, the URL belonging to Ian Robathan’s blog, Aston Villa News & Views. So, by providing content to balance Dugdale’s delusional rantings, you’re actually assisting him in whatever it is that he’s up to. Unless I’m doing him a massive disservice and it’s just a huge coincidence.

This is the last time I will mention Damian Dugdale or anything from The Villa Blog. I’m actually vaguely impressed that for once he has displayed the balls to be entirely transparent about what absolute pond scum he is. Probably the most honest he’s been in the time that I’ve known of him.

And to Dugdale, I say this: keep visiting astonvillacentral.com regularly, I’ve got loads of exciting ideas lined up that you can try to copy, you pathetic, vindictive, duplicitous little man.

Thank you once again for confirming everything I knew about you. Enjoy your fail.

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If you want, you can follow Zolton here, but more importantly, you really should be following Aston Villa Central.

EDIT: Bylis Ballsh has a Wikipedia page and Zoltan is listed in the current squad. Unfortunately he doesn’t have an entry himself yet, but it can only be a matter of time before he’s sitting front of back four, holding midfields and making nice plays.

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Now that the international break is over without incident, and we know the 32 teams who will be competing for the World Cup in South Africa next year, it’s time to get back to Aston Villa. Wait, there was an incident? Oh, I have been out of the loop, haven’t I!

Alright, I’m labelling this 0% Villa, but I do have the less than tenuous link of Richard Dunne’s involvement and I’m going to exploit it to shoehorn my two penneth into the debate. Mmmm-kay??

Firstly, as a disclaimer, I didn’t watch either leg of the Ireland vs France World Cup play-offs, but I’m not writing about the specific details here, so don’t stop reading just yet. There was an incident after the final whistle in Dublin that should be remembered. Although the details may be disputed, the scenes that followed surely can’t be regarded as a good advertisement for the game. That’s all that needs to be said at this point, but I’ll return to it towards the end.

So on to Paris, and despite some alleged proclamations from certain Frenchmen that the tie was over, Ireland had everything to play for. 33 minutes in and and Robbie Keane restored the status quo. Game very much on and, assuming more goals would be forthcoming with close to an hour remaining, Ireland effectively only needed to score one less goal than France to qualify. However, with no further score during the remainder of normal time, extra time and penalties beckoned.

But then in the 103rd minute Thierry Henry cheated by keeping the ball in play with his hand, setting up William Gallas with an unmissable opportunity to book France a place in South Africa next year. Yes, make no mistake, I don’t want to argue about the morality of cheating, or who else would have done the same, or even who really is at fault here, let’s just call a spade a spade for a moment – Henry deliberately handled the ball and gained an advantage which is against the rules and is therefore cheating. No more to discuss there, let’s move on.

Thierry Henry has developed a reputation for honesty and integrity to the point that, combined with his obvious talent on the field and his natural wit and intelligence, he’s rightly considered an ambassador of the game, both literally and metaphorically. Naturally, a certain amount of surprise is generated when Thierry Henry blatantly cheats. Let’s take a moment to think about why Henry might be driven to cheating.

Thierry Henry is a fantastic footballer, I’m a genuine fan of the player and the man, but he’s not super human. He didn’t have time to consider the pros and cons of handling the ball before he did so, he can only have made the decision instinctively. This means that despite his propensity for honesty, it’s still ingrained in him that it was worth the risk. Why? Quite possibly it was unlikely that he’d be caught and even if he was, the punishment would be slight. As it is, it paid off and he won’t be planning on booking himself a holiday during June next year.

I think I’m right in saying that FIFA have shot down the chances of a replay before the Irish had formally asked for one and I’m not convinced that would be the right solution anyway. 22 men kicking a piece of leather around is an unpredictable business and had this goal been disallowed, with 17 minutes left to play, there’s every chance that France may have scored another anyway. No one can say for certain, but if the chances of that happening are slim, the chances that they may have won the penalty shoot out are far greater. All thing being equal, it’s as likely that France could have still won under fair circumstances as the Irish. If a replay were held and France won then it would prove to have been pointless, but if Ireland were to be victorious then there would naturally be protestations over every little detail from the French. Plus, where do you hold it and how does the score from the previous leg(s) factor? No, I just don’t see it happening.

Again, I’m obviously not suggesting that Henry had time to consider all this, but as a professional with all his experience, he knows all of this and that lead him to deliberately handle the ball. What’s the worst that could have happened if the referee had spotted it? Goal disallowed, obviously. A yellow card perhaps, but a red would surely be unlikely? And if someone like Henry is willing to cheat when push comes to shove, what does it take some of his fellow professionals to cheat? So often it would appear that the answer is very little.

So what could persuade players not to cheat? You already know the answer, it’s punishment. Look, my moral values are what prevent me from wanting to rob a bank. I don’t want to discuss where I derive my moral compass, it’s a debate I’m very well versed in and you’ll get short shrift from me if you think it’s from any supernatural source. Sufficed to say that I know it’s wrong and it’s really for that reason that I don’t pull a stocking over my head and point a gun at a bank teller. However, when times get tough, when it gets to the wire, those morals could take a back seat my friend and it would take something a bit stronger to dissuade me. Ultimately, we have the rule of law and punishment for those who break the rules. I don’t want to go to prison, I’m far too pretty, so I won’t be engaging in a stick up any time soon.

UEFA recently made a ham-fisted attempt to inject some authority into the problem of diving by retrospectively punishing Eduardo based on video evidence. They soon backed down under howls of protest about witch hunts and claims about dangerous precedents being set. They most certainly could have gone about it better, but I supported the principle of intervening where justice had not been done and the rules allowed them to.

“Where will it all end?”, a friend asked me. Maybe with diving becoming a thing of the past is the obvious answer. Sure, it would be a lot of work to start with. Yes, a video board would have to review every dubious tackle. It might seem never ending. But eventually, it would become ingrained in the minds of the players that if they take a dive, a week or two later, maybe a month, they’ll be on the wrong end of a match ban. Imagine that coming through right before an important match. Don’t you think that the managers might be advising their players a bit differently under those circumstances than they are currently? I do.

I only really bring the Eduardo incident up as we have the means to introduce that method as a solution right now. Every professional game of a level worth being concerned about has cameras at the stadiums and the footage can be made available to a review board if required. It would be a bit bureaucratic and outside the spirit of the game, but it would work up to a point.

The downside to that approach is the retrospective nature and the accusations that will naturally be made that cases of cheating missed by the referee have effected the result, as is the case with Thierry Henry. I would still argue that over time the players would be less likely to cheat in the first place, but lets assume that such a system existed now and Thierry Henry still cheated. A video panel with power to ban Thierry Henry, even severely enough to miss the World Cup himself, wouldn’t be doing much justice in Irish eyes. Again, I don’t see replaying the match as a viable solution, so we have to seriously find a way to get this right in real time.

If you’re against video replays during games, I’m sorry folks, it’s time to reconsider. This is the World Cup we’re talking about here. It’s the most watched, arguably most prestigious sporting event in the world. It’s just that important that we get this right now. It is the 21st century after all.

One of the main arguments against referees having access to video replays during a match is that it will slow the game down. I don’t want that to happen any more than the next fan, although I can imagine the TV broadcasters might quite fancy a sly opportunity to slip in a commercial. Seriously, enduring the way that sport is presented on TV in America, that prospect alone is enough to convince me that this can’t be allowed to interrupt the game. With the technology at our disposal I don’t accept that it has to be that way though. As TV viewers we can view replays within seconds and all we’re generally missing while watching the video is live pictures of the players protesting to the referee. There’s a built in slack there to be exploited.

So, the use of the video replay would have to be as sympathetic to the flow of the game as possible. I don’t want to get bogged down with specifics here, but there’s clearly some situations that would benefit from taking a moment to review play and come to the correct decision and others where it’s not worth the investment. If you watch the replays of this incident, the nature of the appeals from the Irish players the second that Thierry touched the ball with his hand and the fact that it ended in a goal, a vitally important goal that held the fate of both teams, warranted the referee to get another look or a second opinion from someone in a video booth.

Finally, I again return to the point that I find it highly unlikely that a player like Thierry Henry would engage in an act of blatant cheating like this if he knew without any fear of contradiction that he would be caught and he would be punished. This of course means that if the players aren’t creating the conditions that require the video replay because they know it’s not worth it, you subsequently don’t have the game interrupted in the way you might fear.

It would surely take some time to achieve this. There would be a pain barrier to go through, a learning curve perhaps. It would certainly be technically challenging and would doubtless have some effect on the game, at least initially, but it has to be worth it in the long run, doesn’t it?

While we’re at it, why not install game clocks so we can all see exactly how long is left to play. Don’t get me wrong, I’m more than happy with the current rules about time keeping, I just want the transparency to understand those additional minutes at Old Trafford in real time and I’d like to feel secure in the knowledge that the same rules are being applied in exactly the same way at Villa Park.

However, every time we have a major incident like this it tends to reignite debate about technological improvements, but we’re no further forward and there’s nothing to suggest an end any time soon. We should give it a fair chance, but the additional 2 linesman being trialled in the Europa League just looks weird to me and I remain to be convinced that the answer to poor refereeing is more referees.

To return specifically to France; they were unable to top out a fairly weak qualifying group and arguably benefited from FIFA’s late decision to seed the play-offs. The scenes after the final whistle in Dublin and, more importantly, the alleged instigation are shameful and then the blatant cheating to seal qualification in Paris. Finally, while I understand that FIFA are considering playing with the seeding procedure for the finals and if they do, it may not favour the French, although I have to admit not investigating the detail just yet, it’s possible that France could be one of the 8 seeded teams in South Africa next year. There’s something very, very wrong with this situation and we should all be concerned with fixing it instead of speculating who might have done the same thing in Henry’s position and how we might feel about it.

I don’t know about you, but I’d take the odd 20 or 30 second delay during a game to ensure we get the right teams competing for the right to call themselves World Champions.

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