POSTED: Wednesday August 18th 2010
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
France Tries to Clean up its Act Following World Cup Debacle
For a national embarrassment, France’s World Cup disaster sure is taking a long time to be swept under the rug.
Maybe France deserves props for taking the tournament and its team’s winless record so seriously to the point of airing out the team’s dirty laundry publicly for all to see. Accountability is a virtue, after all. More likely, however, this whole incident, reeks of dysfunction on a national level.
On Tuesday, the French Football Federation suspended players Nicolas Anelka, Patrice Evra, Franck Ribery, and Jeremy Toulalan for their roles in a team-wide boycott of a practice during the tournament. Anelka, who was sent home after verbally assaulting coach Raymond Domenech, thus triggering the boycott, received 18 games. Then-captain Evra received five games. Ribery and Toulalan received three and one-game bans respectively.
The actual incident was bad enough, an irrefutable display of disrespect for authority if there ever was one. The boycott? All it did was reinforce an image of prima donna athletes looking for any excuse to get out of work in the minds of soccer fans the world over. I mean, I know the French are only allowed to work 35 hours per week, but maybe they were going just un petit peu overboard? And if the boycott was horrible, the last-place finish in the tournament’s group round made a laughingstock of a country just 12 years removed from a world championship.
Hell, France is just four years removed from a second-place finish that is made even more relevant by captain Zinedine Zidane’s infamous selfish decision to headbutt Italy’s Marco Materazzi in the last World Cup final. However one looks at it, French soccer players have a history of choosing themselves before their team and then their country.
The FFF is no doubt taking the most proper actions it can to help right the ship that is France’s football program, but by the same token it may very well be too little too late. How many more times will a player be allowed to instruct his coach to “go f*** yourself, you filthy son of a bitch”, as Anelka reportedly told Domenech?
Laurent Blanc, who was a member of the 1998-championship team, has since replaced Domenech as head coach. Upon his appointment, he suspended all 23 roster players from competition for their part in the boycott. But only time will tell if these disciplinary actions will have the desired effect. At the end of the day, we’re clearly not talking about 23 players making a random mistake, but a long series of actions dating back at least four years to Zidane’s faux pas.
I can understand to a certain extent one player losing his cool and launching a verbal strike upon his coach of similar severity to any one beat down France itself suffered during the tourney. But an entire roster of players, one after the other, then independently deciding to forego practice the next day, speaks to a culture characterized by a grandiose sense of entitlement usually reserved for megalomaniacs. That Anelka refused to publicly apologize for his actions further proves this.
So, Anelka’s international career is effectively ended thanks to the 18-game suspension. Good riddance. There’s no room in sports for spoiled star athletes who believe themselves to be bigger than their country. Now, all France needs to do is find a way to get that point across throughout all levels of sport. A monumental task to be sure, but an all-important one nonetheless. As Zidane helped to prove, a future World Cup may depend on it.
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Keywords · Nicolas Anelka · Raymond Domenech · French Football Federation · soccer · Patrice Evra · Laurent Blanc · World Cup
Name: John Waverly
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