During a week in which the sports pages of the UK national press came to resemble those of ‘Plumbing Today’ or ‘Which Bathroom’, we must give thanks for variations in the English language.
In the United States a ‘tap’ is known as a ‘faucet’. Thankfully, that term is not used in the United Kingdom, which spared us from headlines describing how Chelsea boss Jose Mourinho tried to ‘faucet-up Ashley Cole’, something which not only contravenes Premier League regulations but brings tears to the eyes.
English Champions Chelsea were fined £300,000 and their manager £200,000 for ‘tapping-up’ Arsenal and England full-back Cole. For the sake of simplicity this means meeting him and his agent for tea and, one presumes, the intention of discussing his future. This contravenes league rules that say you have to get the permission of a contracted player’s club if you want to talk to him.
We are told that the meeting was engineered by the two agents, over whom the Premier League apparently has no jurisdiction. Instead, they have been left trembling in the corridor outside headmaster Blatter’s office in Zurich, with exercise books stuffed down their pants in anticipation of the punishment that FIFA might hand out.
Cole himself has been fined £100,000 and the whole episode has driven a wedge between him and the club that, the whispers say, is likely to have him transferred to Barcelona tout de suite.
Cole intends to appeal to whatever tier of the European judicial system will give him what he perceives as justice. It will be an interesting case.
In this instance, the appellants will be arguing that a professional sportsman should be treated like any other worker. Yet in other cases, such as the competition issues surrounding the collective sale of media rights, sports bodies are anxious to argue that they deserve to be a special case.
Whatever the outcome of any appeals, former professional footballers will tell you that tapping-up happens all the time and always has. The approach may not be direct but through an intermediary, perhaps a friend or former team mate of the tapee, but the end result is the same. Consequently, some argue, it would be far more honest to abandon pretence and let what will be, be.
Anyway let’s not kid ourselves, tapping-up doesn’t have to be the result of a meeting between player and prospective new employer. Stories placed in the media, often by agents we’re told, manage to do much the same thing, if in a more subtle way.
And how about the reverse situation, where a player who is under contract lets it be known - possibly through an extensively quoted ‘close friend’ for example, that being with his current club is hurting his international prospects and that, although it would break his heart to go, he feels he must. That’s not tapping up of course, but maybe ‘tapping out’ a kind of modern day morse-code message saying ‘Come And Get Me Now’.
Much has also been made this week about the freedom of ‘ordinary’ people to speak to prospective new employers about their next step on the career ladder, but this true story suggests that it isn’t always the straightforward, win-win process we might sometimes imagine.
A highly experienced sports TV executive employed by an international company was tempted to hold exploratory talks about the possibility of a high profile new job when it became publicly known that there was to be a vacancy.
He attended the meeting on a Friday and returned to his office the following Monday, only to be fired on the spot. Somewhere along the line his reasonable expectations of confidentiality had been breached and he was out on his ear faster than a Defoe transfer request.
Footballers, like everybody else, naturally have a right to take steps to further their careers. However, their careers are based on the money paid by fans that also have a right to demand a degree of loyalty to the cause. Perhaps we could have a tapping-up window which, in the manner of speed-dating, the tappers and tappees could get together for tea and biscuits at some central hotel and tap away to their hearts’ content for a set period before moving on to their next target. At least that way we’d all know where we stood and it would avoid repetition of the near farce of the last week in which massive fines have been handed down to everybody except the instigators.
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Sunday sees the kick-off of Euro 2005, UEFA’s women’s football championship.
Eight teams, divided into two groups, will play at soccer grounds in the north west of England.
The England team kicks off on Sunday evening at Manchester City’s City of Manchester Stadium against Finland and a 20,000-plus crowd is expected.
The tournament is seen as a potential turning point for women’s football in the UK and elsewhere in Europe. The BBC is showing every England game and one semi-final and the final will be shown live. Eurosport is showing every game live.
Although earlier attempts to launch a professional club (Fulham) in the English league ultimately failed, the women’s game has gained credibility and popularity in recent years. The Cup Final is regularly shown live on terrestrial television and has started to attract a significant live attendance.
Elsewhere in Europe, the women’s game has developed faster and semi-professional leagues are established in Italy and Scandinavia.
The hope is that the sustained media attention on Euro 2005 will make heroes of some of the players and lead to a surge of interest that will catapult the game to new heights of popularity, and attract really significant commercial interest for more or less the first time.
But that’s going to require outstanding performances on the pitch and England are 12-1 with bookmakers Ladbrokes, who make reigning champions Germany, at 8-11, overwhelming favourites to retain their title.
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On Monday the International Olympic Committee is due to publish the report of its Evaluation Commission that, earlier this year, conducted appraisal visits to each of the five candidate cities.
The report will not rank the cities but will form the basis of the information on which IOC members will make their decision in a month’s time.
Insiders say that the report is likely to cement the positions of Paris
