THE MAN TRULY IN THE KNOW
Cristiano Ronaldo may never have heard of Neil Back nor Percy Montgomery but he could do worse than find out what happened to them as fellow professionals who lost the plot and manhandled a match official.
The footballer got five matches for pushing referee Ricardo de Burgos during Real Madrid's win over Barcelona in the first leg of the Spanish Super Cup. Far from showing remorse, Ronaldo railed against ‘persecution', lambasting the punishment as ‘exaggerated and ridiculous'.
Imagine, then, what he would have said had he been a rugby player. Back got six months for the sort of push-over not seen at Twickenham before or since, shoving referee Steve Lander during Leicester's 1996 English Cup final against Bath.
Many within the game thought the England flanker had got off lightly, too lightly. Seven years later, during a Swansea-Newport Welsh League match a few months before the clubs reinvented themselves as Ospreys and Dragons, the WRU found Montgomery guilty of the technical assault of a touch judge, Peter Rees.
They banned him for two years, suspending the last 18 months of the sentence which enabled the Springbok to resume his career in Wales the following December. Again there were mutterings that the game had gone soft on those guilty of a cardinal sin.
“People may view this sentence as lenient,'' Montgomery said in a statement issued through his lawyer. “But given the material financial loss I am likely to suffer, I feel that I have been dealt with harshly, but fairly.”
It put him out of bounds for the World Cup later that year although he may have been left in a state of suspension anyway given South Africa's policy at the time of not picking those earning their crust under European skies.
Montgomery, who was fined £15,000, at least had the good grace to apologise. He also acknowledged that there was ‘no excuse for such behavior'.
Ronaldo, fined considerably less at €1,750, a laughable amount for one whose earning power is measured in tens of millions, gives the clear impression that he has nothing to apologise for. “It's impossible to stay quiet in this situation,'' he fumed. “Five matches! This is what you call persecution.”
He spouts forth about an ‘exaggerated' reaction to the offence but the only exaggeration lies in Ronaldo's reference to a five-match ban, if by that he was referring solely to the push. He got four for pushing Senor de Burgos, the other match for the red card.
The poor old referee is left as the ultimate fall guy, unworthy of even the most superficial word of regret from the player or his club. They sounded too busy defending their man to be bothered by any expression of sorrow to the referee for what Ronaldo did in their name.
The most depressing reaction came from the head coach, Zinedine Zidane. “I am, and we are, very upset,'' he was reported as saying. “To think that he'll not play for five matches makes you think something is not right.”
The something's that not right is the attitude to the referee, the refusal to accept that he is there to apply the laws of the game, not to be pushed around as if he were just another player. “Cristiano wants to play,'' says Zidane.
“When he doesn't play, he's not happy.” That sounds almost too preposterous for words, as if Ronaldo is the victim, not Ricardo de Burgos but then nobody in this charade seemed to stop and consider the referee's state of unhappiness at having been on the receiving end.
Rugby has been disfigured by too many unsavoury incidents in recent years to be in any position to claim the moral high ground over football but heaven forbid that it would ever see one of its referees manhandled and let the offender off with a four-match ban to be served with indecent haste.
Ronaldo is a wonderful footballer, probably the best big-occasion performer in the game as Wales discovered in the semi-finals of the Euros last summer. That does not put him above the law even if his recent behaviour on and off the field suggests he thinks he is. Imagine the ructions had Ronaldo been captain of the Lions in the last minute of the last Test when Romain Poite gave the All Blacks that penalty.
Where Sam Warburton politely asked M.Poite to review the incident, Ronaldo would have been self-combusting at the injustice of it all.
The different reactions would have been prompted by different motivations. One has respect for the referee, the other doesn't appear to. Zidane would surely have been better off saying that Ronaldo's action was indefensible instead of being ‘bothered' by the length of the ban.
