Manchester City manager's waving of an object that is not there leaves the Football Association wrestling with the nonexistent
Racial abuse, simulation, injury-faking, two-footed leg-breakers, fan misbehaviour, player depression, alcoholism and gambling; leveraged buyouts, unfit and improper owners, clubs going into administration and almost out of existence, rising ticket prices and falling attendances. In a sport as increasingly beset by serious problems as it is apparently bereft of moral probity, it has been heart-warming this week to see the Football Association promise to crack down on the critical issue of managers and players waving ? things that aren't there.
In the very unlikely event that you have been lucky enough to miss all this: during the Manchester derby in the FA Cup third round, City's Vincent Kompany was sent off for a studs-up challenge on United's Nani that the referee, Chris Foy, deemed dangerous enough to merit instant dismissal. After the game, the City manager, Roberto Mancini, moaned that Foy's decision to brandish an actual red card had been influenced by Wayne Rooney's decision to wave an imaginary one, in the now customary style of vigorously shaking a raised, clenched fist with thumb visibly squeezed against inner-forefinger, like a priest sprinkling his congregation with an aspergillum, or a very small barman stretching to pull a pint of Old Speckled Hen.
In the two matches City have contested since, Mancini has demonstrated that he is very much from the "do as I say, not as I do" school, on both occasions waving imaginary cards in unsuccessful bids to have players dismissed. When pulled up on his hypocrisy, Mancini mumbled unconvincingly about it being "different" when managers do it, because consigned to a place on the periphery of the white-hot cauldron of battle, they are out of the field of vision of referees and therefore cannot influence them. Roberto, meet Sir Alex.
As justification for poor behaviour goes, Mancini's was unconvincing, albeit considerably less lame than the "Actually, I fell into the lifeboat and it took off before I could get out ? honest" defence offered up this week by another high-profile middle-aged, bronzed Italian in charge of a listing ship. But considering how some referees portentously go about dispensing justice, it is difficult to imagine that any manager could go unnoticed if he ran the sending-off gamut.
Considering how often match officials appear to see things that have not actually happened, it seems inconceivable that they could miss the sight of a man in a place of prominence on the touchline blowing an imaginary whistle, sprinting towards the imaginary scene of an imaginary crime, only to suddenly backpedal furiously while shooing away the inevitable imaginary players that swarm around him protesting innocence, before singling out an imaginary transgressor and theatrically producing the imaginary red card. Think Martin O'Neill's regular and conspicuous technical area impersonations of Basil Fawlty thrashing a car with a branch but with a more considered, sinister and specific outcome in mind.
Neither has it gone unnoticed that in the midst of the furore surrounding Mancini's imaginary card-waving and simultaneous railing against same, a number of his peers have been critical of his behaviour, tacitly suggesting that the dark art of attempting to get opposing players dismissed is a particularly cynical, dishonest and Italian innovation that has infiltrated the otherwise impregnable fortress of moral fortitude and playful innocence that is the Premier League.
If anything, however, it is Mancini's honesty that has been his undoing. Throughout the whole sorry farrago, he has never once denied waving an imaginary red card, when he could so easily have claimed to have been brandishing a card of a completely different hue or bent: an imaginary yellow card, an imaginary Nectar card, an imaginary playing card, an imaginary Top Trumps card, an imaginary credit card, an imaginary Lottery scratchcard (think of all the imaginary money you could win?), an imaginary Victoria & Albert Museum membership card or an imaginary birthday, wedding, condolences or get well soon card.
Footballers have long been criticised, often unfairly, for their lack of intelligence but Mancini always seemed to be one of the smart guys. If he believes the waving of imaginary cards from the technical area to be an exercise in futility but insists on doing it anyway, you would think he would be at least clever enough to understand that perhaps the only advantage of these garish, nonexistent rectangular pieces of stiff paper is their status of not actually being there.
It follows that this nonexistence ought to render it impossible for rival managers, sanctimonious media pundits or FA disciplinary committees to actually prove whether the imaginary object he was seen holding aloft from his position near the bench was a red card, the Olympic torch or the latest copy of the revamped Big Issue featuring Joey Barton's maiden journalistic treatise.
For the greater good of English football, however, we should applaud the honesty of men like Roberto Mancini, who are prepared to own up to actions which, according to the FA fly in the face of their pitifully inadequate, tokenistic and largely made-up-as-they-bumble-along Respect campaign. Considering the time it is taking the Wembley blazers to sort out the increasingly festering football problems that are all too apparent, one shudders at the thought of how long they would struggle with the complex existential minutiae of those rooted in the realms of the unreal.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2012/jan/20/roberto-mancini-imaginary-red-cards
Derrek Lee Brent Lillibridge John Lindsey James Loney
A Minnesota native who plays for the New Jersey Nets, Humphries threw out the first pitch at Target Field before a game July 1. His fiancee, a reality TV star (like you need to be told) came along for encouragement, and both signed a ball. The pair married in August, but (presumably) soon, both will sign papers making their divorce final. The Twins' website referred to the couple as "ill-fated."
Leave it to Luke Scott to take his act to a swing state during an election year.
