Tuesday, July 11, 2006
zizou's petals
it’s not fair to judge a career by one moment, but for most sports fans Zinédine Zidane is now that French guy who head butted the Italian guy and got thrown out of the World Cup final. It’s too bad, because Zidane gave the game a lot more than that throughout his career.
Insults and cheap shots are commonplace in the game, with players constantly trying to get under the skin of their opponent in the hopes that it will throw off their concentration, or even better, provoke the player to do something stupid and get a card. So I was astounded that Zidane would allow himself to get wound up like that, given all that was on the line, both for his team and country and for himself personally. I wonder if we’ll ever know what was said between the two players. The initial rumors are that he was called a terrorist or that the comment was a racial slur. The one part I found humorous is that in most sports, if something has snapped and you’re out to hurt the guy, you haul off and punch him. But this being soccer, you’re not allowed to use your hands, so Zidane’s first instinct was to head butt the guy. Too funny.
A final piece of interest in this whole incident was that we may have seen the first use of instant replay in the sport of soccer. The head butt occurred well behind the play that was going on upfield, so the main referee didn’t see it at all. Typically this sort of off the ball stuff is spotted by the linesman or 4th official. They get the ref’s attention, they pow-wow and the ref takes action based on what his team has told him happened. This did happen eventually with Zidane, but it came about very slowly. The referee only walked back to the play because Materazzi was still down on the field, not because he’d been called over by the linesman. During this time, they showed a replay of the incident on the screen inside the stadium (typically a no-no for controversial plays), then the refs all got together and finally Zidane was red carded. So it seemed fairly clear that the linesman only saw the play from the replay shown on the screen, not when it happened on the field. It was certainly the correct call, but strictly speaking it was a violation of the rules of the game for the refs to make a call based on a replay rather than what they had seen (or not seen) themselves. I will be curious to see if FIFA addresses this, and clarifies the policy going forward.
it’s not fair to judge a career by one moment, but for most sports fans Zinédine Zidane is now that French guy who head butted the Italian guy and got thrown out of the World Cup final. It’s too bad, because Zidane gave the game a lot more than that throughout his career.
Insults and cheap shots are commonplace in the game, with players constantly trying to get under the skin of their opponent in the hopes that it will throw off their concentration, or even better, provoke the player to do something stupid and get a card. So I was astounded that Zidane would allow himself to get wound up like that, given all that was on the line, both for his team and country and for himself personally. I wonder if we’ll ever know what was said between the two players. The initial rumors are that he was called a terrorist or that the comment was a racial slur. The one part I found humorous is that in most sports, if something has snapped and you’re out to hurt the guy, you haul off and punch him. But this being soccer, you’re not allowed to use your hands, so Zidane’s first instinct was to head butt the guy. Too funny.
A final piece of interest in this whole incident was that we may have seen the first use of instant replay in the sport of soccer. The head butt occurred well behind the play that was going on upfield, so the main referee didn’t see it at all. Typically this sort of off the ball stuff is spotted by the linesman or 4th official. They get the ref’s attention, they pow-wow and the ref takes action based on what his team has told him happened. This did happen eventually with Zidane, but it came about very slowly. The referee only walked back to the play because Materazzi was still down on the field, not because he’d been called over by the linesman. During this time, they showed a replay of the incident on the screen inside the stadium (typically a no-no for controversial plays), then the refs all got together and finally Zidane was red carded. So it seemed fairly clear that the linesman only saw the play from the replay shown on the screen, not when it happened on the field. It was certainly the correct call, but strictly speaking it was a violation of the rules of the game for the refs to make a call based on a replay rather than what they had seen (or not seen) themselves. I will be curious to see if FIFA addresses this, and clarifies the policy going forward.
