Michel Platini and Uefa's continued reluctance to use their power for the public good makes them accessories to a crime
Given an immediate opportunity to confront the most pressing off-the-pitch issue at the Euro 2012 finals, Uefa has blown it again. Few will be surprised. The governing body's attempt to deny reports of racist abuse aimed at members of the Holland squad in Krakow yesterday is entirely consistent with their passive approach to a disease that, as the English experience has shown, can be treated with some success.
"We have no plans to launch an investigation," Uefa said. This is the body who fined the Spanish FA a mere £45,000 after the black English players Ashley Cole, Shaun Wright-Phillips, Jermaine Jenas and Jermain Defoe had been openly abused during a friendly in Madrid's Bernabéu stadium in 2004, and who demanded only £16,500 from the Serbian association after their fans had jeered black members of England's Under-21 squad in Holland three years later. When Croatian fans held up a racist banner during a match against Turkey in the Euro 2008 championships, the penalty was an equally derisory £10,000.
These sums never looked like deterrents, and so it has proved. And now, faced with a specific complaint from a group of players, they do nothing at all with conspicuous briskness.
Dutch players are never slow to join an argument, but it would be hard to imagine that there was no substance at all to their allegation that this week's training session in the Stadion Miejski, the home of Wisla Krakow, was interrupted by monkey noises from spectators at one end of the ground, directed at the black members of their squad. Mark van Bommel, their captain, could hardly have been more explicit in his complaint about what he called "a real disgrace", or more direct in his condemnation of Uefa's state of denial. "You need to open your ears," he said. "If you did hear it, and don't want to hear it, that is even worse."
The attempt to pretend that the abuse came from fans disappointed that Krakow was not included in the tournament's match schedule flies in the face of the testimony from the players themselves. They would hardly be looking for an opportunity to alienate fans in the country in which, should they fulfil expectations of qualification from Group B, they will be playing their quarter-final match.
At the very least their complaint should have been given the dignity of proper consideration. If they were indeed mistaken about the nature of the abuse, fair enough. But by reaching an exculpatory judgment on a matter of great sensitivity with what seems like indecent haste, Uefa has made it look as though it is primarily interested in sweeping the matter under the red carpet on which it will parade at tonight's opening ceremony.
Fighting the plague of racism head-on involves taking every allegation seriously. Painful as it is to say this about a body headed by one of the great figures of modern football, only when Michel Platini and Uefa learn that lesson will they themselves deserve to be taken for anything but blazered fools and apparatchiks whose continued reluctance to use their power for the public good makes them accessories to a crime. Read More
انسخ الكود التالى و ضعه فى موقعك او مدونتك.
