…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.
So what are YOU going to do? 