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    Points well made and taken but consider also these words from someone who is very much not English:

    Isha Johansen, chair of the Confederation of African Football's women's football committee, said she wanted an investigation to be opened.

    Johansen, who is also the president of the Sierra Leone Football Association, told BBC Sport it was an "embarrassing situation".

    In a statement, she said: "Whilst remaining proud of our African teams that participated in the Fifa Women's World Cup, yesterday's match between England and Cameroon reflected badly, not only on African women's football but African football on the whole.

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      Originally posted by Janik View Post
      I'm reasonably sure that is accurate. Other media outlets have had similar stories, the Cameroon coach used a post-match press conference to say he told his players at half-time that the referee wanted England to win and the BBC's touchline reporter fed back that the Cameroon players were making accusations of racism against match officials and FIFA in the tunnel at half-time in the game. It was included in the half-time analysis. Dion Dublin and Alex Scott's faces were a picture when they heard it. Dublin may even have said OFFS under his breath! And all because a perfectly good goal against them stood. Shouting racism in a situation like that harms actual cases of it.

      It is also about as bad a case of bullying and intimidation of a match official that it's possible to imagine, short of actual physical assault. And that arguably happened as well with the shove in the back, though like the spitting it there is a benefit of the doubt to the Cameroon player there. Two red cards were nailed on (or should have been), two others the ref would have been well within her rights to show. And probably others for dissent as well. However the false accusations of racism are the most egregious part. The referee should have asked a FIFA official to disqualify Cameroon so she could abandon the game (and if she did and FIFA declined to throw Cameroon out on their arses at half-time, then shame on FIFA). She should not have been forced to deal with such people for another 45 minutes. She has now reportedly admitted she thought it was a penalty on Kirby and a red card for the foul on Houghton, but declined to give those decisions out of fear Cameroon would walk off the pitch. Which shows Cameroon's behaviour worked, but also raises concerns for the safety of England's players in that second half. They were unprotected against violent conduct. The game hadn't 'threatened to spiral out of control' as per that report, it was out-of-control if the ref cannot give appropriate sanctions for fouls and misconduct because of fear for the response.


      As to what FIFA do now, that is really difficult. I worry that they will ban Cameroon entirely from the next World Cup. The team may deserve that, but as a course of action the damage it would cause to the sport in Cameroon would be immense. If that happened, I would expect the Cameroonian FA to simply abandon the Women's game. Long personal bans for the coach and certain players (years for the coach, multiple games for players) and a substantial fine for the federation would be better.
      My initial reaction is 3-0...what more do you want..?

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        Points well made and taken but consider also these words from someone who is very much not English:

        Isha Johansen, chair of the Confederation of African Football's women's football committee, said she wanted an investigation to be opened.

        Johansen, who is also the president of the Sierra Leone Football Association, told BBC Sport it was an "embarrassing situation".

        In a statement, she said: "Whilst remaining proud of our African teams that participated in the Fifa Women's World Cup, yesterday's match between England and Cameroon reflected badly, not only on African women's football but African football on the whole.



        Well that's for her to say, not Phil Neville, or jonathan pearce, or rob harris, or ian herbert, or martin lipton.

        there was an Irish female football journalist on the radio and she described it as 90 minutes of utter shithousery, and proceeded to slag off cameroon as a half-way house between tony pullis's stoke, and diego simeone's atletico madrid, which gave me a pretty clear idea of what happened. while managing the neat trick of simultaneously criticizing cameroon, but because they were an aggressive football team that lost the plot when things started to go against them, like a lot of other teams in the rich history of such events, rather than because they were women, or were black, or were from africa, and separating it from anything to do with england, who were relatively unimportant figures in this story. (I mean that england didn't seem to do very much out of the way at all, and it could just as easily have happened to any other team.)

        Comment


          Originally posted by Felicity, I guess so View Post

          My initial reaction is 3-0...what more do you want..?
          FIFA to support their referees in the face of false allegations of racism and campaigns of bullying and intimidation, please. England are an irrelevance here, this is about Cameroon and the match officials.

          Comment


            Originally posted by Jah Womble View Post
            Why, what did she say? I got the impression that Solo was displaying more sympathy for the Cameroon players than perhaps was warranted, but I didn't notice any trolling as such.
            She followed it up with a hilariously enthusiastic yay for Les lionnes indomptables tweet, universally negatively received. Can't believe she wasn't trying to troll, she's not stupid and she's got form as long as your arm for being a contrary mardy-arse

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              Possibly she warmed to Cameroon as she saw in them a team in her own image, ha ha

              Comment


                Oh sure, I know Hope Solo's history - hence my surprise that a) she was selected as a pundit by the BBC and b) that she's actually not been bad.

                That's pretty pathetic, though.

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