MARTIN SAMUEL Column : Henry is not Diego Maradona
It would be easy to board the bandwagon and depict Thierry Henry as the biggest cheat in football.
Easy to call for him to be banned from the World Cup for an offence that, if spotted, would have been punished by a yellow card. Easy to pronounce his good name gone for ever, his presence in South Africa next summer a hollow disgrace.
Were it not for one thing. That in his entire time as a professional footballer, no defender has ever gone to the referee, as Henry was supposed to in the Stade de France last week, and owned up to a foul on him that had not been spotted.
Not one admission of a sly, unnoticed shirt pull in the penalty area. No sneaky little ankle taps, no pushing, no tackles that arrived a split second too late. We expect a level of integrity from Henry, from all forwards in fact, that is not applied throughout the rest of the game.
On Saturday, a great many commentators stated that Hull City should have had a penalty late on against West Ham United but not one condemned Matthew Upson, the defender, for not telling the referee that he had his arms all over Jan Vennegoor of Hesselink to prevent him jumping.
‘I appreciate the score is 3-3 and my team are fighting for their lives in this division,’ Upson could have said, ‘but it is only fair that you award a penalty to Hull because clearly you missed this blatant attempt to cheat on my part.’
So, while many have taken to despising Henry for what he did against the Republic of Ireland last week, I am afraid I cannot.
He was the inspiration for an Arsenal team that, on their day, played the greatest football I have seen from an English club side and I cannot simply erase that because he cheated in one game. As if he is alone in perpetuating football’s culture of dishonesty.
Whenever Diego Maradona’s name is mentioned everybody screams cheat. So what of the anonymous band of cynics that as good as kicked him out of football? Were they not cheats, too? And when a forward gets away with a handball or an avoidable fall, is there not a part of him that regards this as payback for all the times a defender has cynically escaped the system?
The fact is we love creating monsters. In the fall-out from the World Cup play-off in Paris, the actions of the reviled Henry were compared unfavourably with those of honest men.
These paragons of virtue included Paolo Di Canio who, playing for West Ham, picked the ball up on seeing Everton goalkeeper Paul Gerrard down injured, rather than attempting to score. Over nine years Di Canio’s altruism has grown in the imagination until it is forgotten that, far from being a certain goal, Di Canio had an Everton player in front of him, an Everton player closing in on him, and another protecting the goal line. The ball was crossed high and slightly cut back so, to score, Di Canio would have had to pivot and take the shot on the volley as an overhead kick from roughly 14 yards. It was a fine gesture but no tap-in.
Interesting, also, that it should happen at Goodison Park. It is hard to imagine Di Canio doing it at Anfield; indeed, in all likelihood he wouldn’t have been within 200 miles of the place.
In the four-and-a-half seasons Di Canio played for West Ham, he had the opportunity to play 17 league games away from home against teams that finished in the top four; he made it to five. Between January 30, 1999 and May 11, 2003, Di Canio played one league game at Arsenal — the penultimate match of the 1999-2000 season when the league had already been won by Manchester United weeks previously — one at Liverpool and one at Old Trafford.
He did not play a league game away at Newcastle United. He missed every game away to Leeds United in the three seasons the club were strong, finally making it to Elland Road on February 8, 2003, when Leeds were in freefall amid financial crisis. In his first season, Di Canio played away at Wimbledon, Southampton, Aston Villa, Leicester City and Everton, but missed games at Liverpool, Chelsea and Tottenham.
No doubt he had his reasons but, as Di Canio’s contemporaries may have speculated, not every suspicious act is picked up by television camera. It is easy to demonise one player for a moment of moral turpitude but cheating takes many forms.
Maybe Henry should agree to confess all to referees the day every motorist who goes flying through a dormant speed camera pops down to the nick at the end of his journey and asks for three points to be put on his licence.
I still think an attempt to change the culture of football by returning it to the honour system — asking a player outright if he was tripped, or if he handled the ball on the way to goal, and then applying a heavy punishment if he is later found to be lying — is the way forward.
I understand the cynical view that players would deceive to gain an advantage in the moment and to hell with the future, but suspect this would become less of an issue over time as players saw the negative consequences of lengthy suspension and the positive benefits of a cleaner sport.
The main flaw, pointed out by a colleague from Germany, is that the system requires only the forwards to act on oath. Defenders must be asked: ‘Did you make contact?’ as often as forwards are asked: ‘Were you tripped?’ for it to be fair.
And there is the double standard at the heart of the backlash against Henry. We expect forwards to live by a different moral code, to confess to dives and handballs, while the players we know to be doing most of the cheating look on doe-eyed, as if butter wouldn’t melt.
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