“Can they not see that this conduct ultimately leads to violence?”, a remark made by a French friend of mine recently. He was really upset by the world cup final incident largely because of the conduct of the players. Speaking yesterday, Zidane said “My act is not forgivable, but they must also punish the true guilty party, and the guilty party is the one who provokes.” In this light, do we condemn the violence or the conduct which causes it?

Zizou was under immense pressure in the final - the whole French team had been formed around him, and the final result arguably rested heavily on his shoulders. It was one of these shoulders which was almost dislocated in an Italian challenge just prior to his headbutting incident as he was relentlessly marked and hounded by the Italian team. However, Materazzi took the hounding to a new level by insulting Zidane’s family on top of nipple tweaking, shirt pulling and all the other crude insults. If you take a man and pile more and more pressure on him, at some point he will break. To me, the measure of the man is how much pressure he can take before that point is reached. In Zidane’s case, I take the measure of his worth as pretty high. Read more…

In a moment of testosterone-fuelled animality, a billion viewers cried in shocked unison, “what on earth is Zidane doing?” For, the captain of France’s football team, in their chase for the World Cup, had just launched a charging headbutt at Italian player Materazzi, knocking him to the ground. The Frenchman was shown the red card and sent off the pitch.

It was an iconic moment – one that will surely be stamped into the collective memory of this year’s tournament and of Zidane’s largely brilliant career. This was his last game before retirement and the manner in which he chose to exit left the crowd dazed with tension and confusion.

The game seemed to sour from that moment on. It became difficult to root for France… They had lost the moral advantage. Read more…