It’s not quite on the FIFA scale…

…but there are lots of cheats in youth football.

Two of my favourite quotes are due to Pope John Paul II and Albert Camus. Albert, he said, “All that I know most surely about morality and obligations, I owe to football”. JP2, he said, “Amongst all unimportant subjects, football is by far the most important.”

I remind myself of these whenever I come across cheating in youth football. It is quite common. I remember two teams in our division in Norway being penalised for fielding overage players, and that was in a league for 13-year-olds. One hopes the coaches involved would be embarrassed if confronted with it now, several years later. Was it that important to win (they didn’t anyway). On the other side of the world, in the league in Hanoi there have definitely been issues with players presenting pristine birth certificates, re-registered in a province other than their own. I noticed that all the boys involved were large and muscly.

Until now the international school sports scene has been squeaky clean, to my knowledge. Not even a whiff of suspicion. Indeed UNIS has consistently refused to field underage players that would have boosted the team. I agree: Rules is rules. If you’re born too early or too late, tough luck. The international schools tournaments of both MRISA and APAC have been pretty sporting on the pitch/court and very friendly off it. Then there was April’s girls’ football tournament in Beijing…

It was fun but the whole enterprise was somewhat tainted by the apparent cheating of a school who thought it was OK to field players from their sister school, 3 hours’ drive away. The cheating was obvious to us because the players in question (excellent of course, some picked for the national team) had already played in a friendly against UNIS for their own school. The school is according to their website “characterized by the Gospel ideals” and indeed maybe this generously inclusive team selection was part of the school’s drive “To lead an energetic fight against moral degeneration”. Anyway, it was a pity that the organisers didn’t just boot the team out, given that they knew of the situation before a ball was kicked. I did have faith that the APAC powers that be would use their wisdom after the event to enforce the obvious expectation that players in a school team should, you know, actually go to that school but I hear that no such action will be taken. Instead they are apparently going to introduce a rule saying that all the other rules must be followed. The mind boggles at the ingenuity of the solution. So anyway, I look forward to next year when UNIS Hanoi will be entering joint teams with UNIS New York, not forgetting to add a liberal sprinkling of Vietnamese national squad players.

Even if we accept Karol Józef Wojtyła’s dubious premise that some things in life are more important than football, I understand the frustration of players who travelled 4000 km to find themselves playing a bunch of rule-benders. Thank you to the organisers, the spectators, the coaches, the officials and to all the other teams, and may the Lord forgive anybody who cheated.

 

End of year 1

Wow, that went quickly. Everything breaking up next week, some friends have already left and others are in the final spasms of leaving, plans for next year are half-made.

Over the year, the amazing has become the normal. An incredible cloudburst the other day led to puddles bigger than swimming pools (not sure it qualified as flooding around these parts though) and motorbike chaos: I didn’t even mention it to the family. Insects twice the size of ones that previously would have caused a violent panic now get beaten to death by hand. And we laugh at how in the first week we were rather concerned when we found a gecko in our hotel room. Now we are just pleased for the company as the fish have proved rather flimsy and indeed short-lived.

We are looking forward to spending the summer touring Vietnam, moving house and then trekking around Norway and England. And so when we come back it will be to a place with a pool and a cat. Maybe the cat will get the geckos; we certainly hope she will get the rats.

And so what am I going to do? Well, I think being the new chairman of the Hanoi Youth Football League might take up some of my time… Click here and here to see two cracking videos of what the League is about. The mix is incredible: There are teams from an orphanage, teams from a charity for ex-street children, Vietnamese schools, and a dazzling array of international teams.

Anyway, I am permanently jetlagged at the moment due to watching the tennis which is on late at night but this is just practice for the Euros, where matches will kick off at 11 pm and 1.45 am…. and the girls want to be woken up for the three England disasters. Poor inexperienced things.