The International language of Screaming

It being an international weekend there's not much around on the Man United front. One thing to come out of the England game yesterday is some utterly bizarre words on the penalty that England were awarded. The referee makes a bad decision and somehow this is turned round into a "did Rooney dive" controversy. Of course all the papers, from my skimmed reading, say no, but they are all framed in the context of the diving arguments that have been going on since the Eduardo incident. The Mail On Sunday have the headline, "Still not diving Rooney?" Before answering the question in their article:

Although Cesar had hold of Rooney's shirt for a split second, the England forward also seemed to be guilty of the same offence and then fell to the ground as he lost his balance. There was no question of Rooney having dived, but he made a half-hearted penalty appeal and the Slovenia players were furious when Eriksson pointed to the spot.

So no, Rooney still isn't diving.
The Telegraph's version is similar but less sensationalist:

It was not the missing of chances that invited scrutiny — Rooney is allowed an off day — but rather the penalty award in which he was implicated. John Terry’s pre-match insistence that England do not dive guaranteed forensic examination of any free-kick won. So there was nothing better than a controversial penalty to test this purported moral fibre.

Steven Gerrard started it, ambushing Andraz Kirm and chipping in an awkward cross with the outside of his right boot. Rooney and Bostjan Cesar tussled, both went down and the ball rolled to safety. With baffling conviction, referee Jonas Eriksson pointed to the spot. Replays showed that both players had hold of each other’s shirt at some stage, although Rooney’s seemed to be the clearer foul. A dive? Gamesmanship? Rooney didn’t offer much of an appeal so you had to give him the benefit of the doubt.

The Sunday Times is pretty bad, it starts:

GAMESMANSHIP, it seems, is not solely the preserve of the foreigner.

At the end of a week in which Uefa handed down a two-match ban to Eduardo for diving his way to a Champions League penalty, Wayne Rooney stood accused of manufacturing the spot-kick that gave England the lead against Slovenia.

Let's face it, he had that first line ready since John Terry said what he said about England not diving, and anything he could he could attach it to would come to the fore. Here's the description of the penalty:

While Cesar clearly laid a hand on Rooney’s shoulder, the England striker responded by grabbing a generous handful of the centre-back’s shorts.

Off-balance as he reached for the ball, Cesar also received a kick from Rooney that took him out of the game and Slovenia’s crucial World Cup qualifier against Poland in midweek. At best, the Swedish referee should have ignored the incident; instead he inexplicably awarded England a penalty that Frank Lampard converted with the minimum of fuss.

Where's the dive there? Further down the article we have this:

The incident certainly underlined the stupidity of John Terry’s optimistic pre-match statement that “diving is something the England lads don’t do”.

No it didn't. John Terry's statement is admittedly stupid, but this incident which involved no diving whatsoever, even in this guy's description, has nothing to do with John Terry's statement.

Still on England, The Daily Star has some words from Capello on Owen:

The England manager said of the United striker: “We have checked Owen enough – we ­follow all the players – but ­players need to play.

“I saw him play for 70 minutes at Burnley and I know he scored a good goal at Wigan. He’s fast, his movement in the box is good and he understands when to make his runs.

“He has intelligent movement without the ball but he has not played a lot of games. He has to play – he has to integrate at United.”

Moving away from England, some words from Solskjaer on Anderson:

"It was all glory for him in his first season, but then you sometimes get a bit of a reaction to that," he said. "It happens to a lot of players.

"But with Cristiano Ronaldo gone, we need players like Anderson to step up and say `here is what all the talk was about when you signed me.'

"It is always going to be a big challenge at United to get a place in the first team.

"No player at United is going to step aside and say `here you take my place.'

"You have to fight for it and he is more than capable of doing that as he is proving.

"He volunteered to play for the reserves. Asking to play just shows his professionalism and determination to succeed."

There's a lot in the papers on the Chelsea/young players thing, most of which I'm not mentioning because there's nothing but the usual about us in them, the only one I will mention is this from The Mail On Sunday, whose headline includes "Manchester United and other English clubs..." Why the need to mention us? Why not just "English Clubs" which as a set includes us? The article itself mention Arsenal, Liverpool and Chelsea as well, so why single us out? The article itself has the usual stuff about us in it, so I'll just quote this little bit, offering a different perspective to the sanctimonious moral outrage pouring from everyone's mouths:

Although it was FIFA who have jurisdiction over the Kakuta case, it is Europe's governing body, UEFA, and their president, Platini, to whom falls the long-term task of attempting to outlaw the transfer of children across borders.

Platini's problem is that a founding principle of the European Union is the free movement of workers from the age of 16. Chelsea are likely to invoke this argument when appealing in the Kakuta case as well as the suggestion that any contract he signed at 14 was legally unenforceable.

In echoes of the case of Jean-Marc Bosman, who transformed football in 1995 by using European law to allow players freedom of contract, Chelsea's lawyers might also argue that to prevent a teenager from moving across Europe to earn more money is little more than bonded labour