Football is a passionate game and the World Cup is the epitome of sporting excellence, a jamboree of colour and culture mixing in a sporting melting pot, to give us one month of sheer footballing joy.
It is a time to rejoice in the skill and splendour that go to make up the 'greatest show on earth'. For any player lucky enough to be fit and picked for the World Cup, it represents the pinnacle of their career; it’s the zenith of any player’s career, and will be remembered by all participants forever.
If you’re one of the chosen ones who’ll score a goal in this summer’s World Cup Finals then the joy you’ll feel will excel all other feelings of joy you’ve felt as a footballer. Imagine winning the lottery, falling in love and jumping out of a plane over the Niagara Falls all at once and you still wont come close to the feeling of sheer euphoria and mad delight that the likes of Wayne Rooney (hopefully for England fans) will be experiencing as the ball bulges at the back of a World Cup net.
Ask any amateur footballer about the feelings they’re going through simply when watching one of their team-mates put the ball in the back of the net. Let alone scoring one for themselves and they’ll tell you it’s akin to that first rush you get when embarking on a new romance. Furthermore ask that same footballer to describe a goal that he scored in a 10-1 defeat and he’ll describe for you perfectly every touch, fake and dribble. He’ll tell you how many men he beat (honestly or not) and he’ll even be able to tell you whether he could hear the ball as it hit the net. Why, he’ll even be able to tell you the manner in which the ball hit the net and swished round the goal, or the fact that he’d forgotten his lucky red sock that day! He may even be able to tell you about the mountain of teammates that piled on top of him.
But you ask that same footballer after the game what he was thinking the split second after the ball went in, and how exactly he celebrated and he’ll struggle to tell you, and there’s a very good reason for that. The fact is that the split moment after a goal, you lose control, a kind of temporary insanity takes over and you give in, to pure joy and pleasure, for one glorious instant you’re taken to a place where everything’s beautiful and nothing else matters apart from joy. And you as the goal scorer are the conduit for these emotions and all you want to do is express them.
Which is why the decision to book a player, to punish him because of his expressions of joy is ridiculous. At the moment as the law decreed by FIFA states, if a player removes his shirt by way of goal celebration he will receive a mandatory yellow card.
This leads us to the unthinkable situation, whereby a player gets sent off because he’s displaying joy and passion. Football is a passionate game and this is a large part of its appeal, the passion of the players twinned passion of the fans, it all goes together to make football the enthralling spectacle it is. FIFA state that it is an excessive display of joy if a player removes his shirt in celebration (this includes lifting the shirt to cover the face a la Fabrizio Ravanelli). Our argument is that the removal of a shirt, after a player has just scored in the greatest football tournament of them all cannot be viewed as excessive!
In April of 2001 The International Football Association Board, holding its 115th annual general meeting in Edinburgh, Scotland on Saturday, 10 March, decided that relevant mandatory instructions would be issued to match officials throughout the world.
One of these relevant mandatory instructions was; "The celebration of goals is only to be considered as a punishable offence if it borders on provocation or leads to time-wasting. Contrary to current regulations, it will no longer automatically be a cautionable offence if a player takes off his shirt to celebrate a goal. In this respect, the International F.A. Board and FIFA recognise the natural and emotional joy of scoring goals".
Yet in June 2004 at the 118th annual general meeting law 12 was amended and we’re in the situation that we’re in today.
These players aren’t robots and nor should we want them to be, so therefore worldcuplatest.com is launching the 'Put The Passion Back In Football Campaign' and is petitioning the International F.A Board and FIFA at the next annual general meeting in Zurich on March 2nd 2006 to revoke the amendment to rule 12 now, and forever more.
View the ammendment at:
http://www.fifa.com/en/development/refereeing/index/0,1247,101908,00.html?articleid=101908
View the booking guidelines for shirt removal at:
http://www.fifa.com/documents/fifa/regulations/Removal_of_the_jersey.pdf
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