The William Gallas Affair: Media Obsession With Witch Hunts

It nearly sounds like a Hollywood movie title—The William Gallas Affair . Maybe not quite the ring to say, The Thomas Crown Affair , but it gives it that mystique.

If you picked up any paper yesterday or tuned into the sports news, it was open season on the Arsenal defender. You wouldn’t be mistaken for thinking that William Gallas had maimed a Bolton player and circled around the player jigging to a Creole war dance, right before spitting on the said player while side footing the ball to another red shirt to mount the Arsenal attack.

William Gallas is no stranger to playing villain. It was only the other day that he was the beneficiary of Thierry Henry’s much maligned assist that sent France to South Africa at the expense of Ireland. The fact that he was in the thick of another controversial goal doesn’t exactly endear him to the establishment, so the over-reaction to the incident with Mark Davies is not a surprise.

I say over-reaction because the issue is straight forward. Both Gallas and Davies went for a 50-50 ball, and both had the right to go for that ball. In that sense, it wasn’t even a tackle, but a mutual challenge for the ball.

Unfortunately for Davies, Gallas didn’t get there on time, and there was never any intent or malice on the part of the Arsenal defender. The challenge for the ball was instinctive, and there was nothing either of the players would have done to avoid the injury.

As usual, there was a campaign mounted by everyone from Sky Sports News to the Racing Redbrige Gazette for the FA to re-referee the match and punish Gallas. It’s the sort of scripted reaction when undesirables do something perceived to be nasty.

What’s interesting for me is the selective amnesia applied by the said media houses in pursuing other injustices in football if the said injustices don’t align with their agenda. The hysteria and feigned anger about this Gallas incident reminds me of the drama and witch hunt that Eduardo experienced after the game with Celtic in August last year.

There’s now an expectation that if Sky Sports News or a national newspaper or tabloid manufactures a story like, "The FA will most definitely have a look at that incident again," then so it shall become true.

The position of the FA was spot on. The referee saw the incident and took it for what it was—a 50-50 challenge that both players were entitled to. The fact that Davies got injured doesn’t change the position that there was no attempt or intent to injure the player. And so the game went on.

Then comes the argument that Arsenal should have been benevolent in the spirit of good sportsmanship and kicked the ball out. What a load of crocked nonsense.

If the referee thought that play needed to be stopped, he would have stopped it. This "good sportsmanship" thing is taken too far. Arsenal of all the teams should know better. They were good "sportsmen" against Chelsea in March 2008 when Joe Cole feigned an injury at Stamford Bridge and Arsenal were on a counter attack and one goal up.

Despite the fact that the Gunners outnumbered the out of position Chelsea players in that counter attack, Emmanuel Eboue did the "good sportsmanship" thing and kicked the ball out so that Joe Cole could get attention.

And what does the Chelsea captain do to return the favour? He throws the ball back towards our goal in an impossible position, and Chelsea end up scoring from that move.

As they say, to hell with sportsmanship. There’s no excuse for Bolton in playing to the whistle and not defending properly. If there’s one thing FIFA have done for the good of the game, it’s to insist that unless a player is dead on the pitch or he has been decapitated, then it’s the referees' decision, and that of no one else, to stop the game.

Maybe we just have to accept that sports editors and programme controllers have the unenviable task of filling the columns and air waves with news cycles 24 hours a day. Inevitably, they’ll start getting anal about the need to make mountains out of mole hills, and in the process, throw the whole concept of journalistic integrity out of the window.

I’m glad though that Mark Davies is not adversely affected by the injury and that it’s just some bruising. He’ll be back in action in a couple of weeks—so meanwhile, he should relax and watch Eastenders or something. Bolton will need him for the relegation fight.

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