Flo Balogun and the (Sort of) Disappearing Red Card

Curmie has a couple of essays already in progress, but he’s going to do something a little out of the ordinary: there are ways in which this piece will be passé within a few hours or so after it’s posted, so it’s quite possible that you, Gentle Reader, will know things that, as of this writing (morning and early afternoon of Monday the 6th), are still unknowable. 

It’s an interesting time of the year for sports fans.  If you narrow your vision to the major team sports in this country, there’s not a lot happening.  The NFL, NBA, and NHL seasons are over, and the MLB pennant races haven’t really shaped up yet: fans know who they want to win, but it’s unclear as yet what other team they want to lose to help their team’s chances.  But Wimbledon is heading into its final week, there’s the WNBA, horse racing (that dead heat in the featured race at Saratoga yesterday was pretty fun), golf… and above all, there’s the World Cup.

Tonight, the USMNT attempts to move on to the quarter-finals for the first time since 2002, and they’ll do so with star striker Folarin “Flo” Balogun in the lineup.  He has three goals in this tournament and no other American has more than one, so that matters.  Balogun received a red card for dangerous play in the second half of the Round of 32 game against Bosnia-Herzegovina; that carries with it not merely being sidelined (without being replaced) for the remainder of the match in question, but a suspension for the next game, as well.  Well, it did… for a while.  We’ll come back to that.

As the photo above shows, there’s no question that Balogun stepped on the ankle of Tarik Muharemovic in a scuffle for a loose ball.  That part is undeniable.  It’s also clear that it was completely unintentional, not malicious or even reckless; Balogun wasn’t even looking at Muharemovic.  Furthermore, it appears that the VAR (Video Assisted Referee) review of the play showed the referee only still and slow-motion images.  A full-speed version would have added important context; former English Premier league referee Andy Davies says the omission “does not align with VAR protocols.”  Anyway, a play that the referee didn’t initially even call a foul turned into a red card. 

Curmie’s own athletic career is, shall we say, rather undistinguished.  He never played in an organized league at a level above collegiate intramurals.  There was one incident, though, that’s pretty memorable, even over a half-century later.  Curmie was in goal for his dorm against our arch-rivals (the dorm just up the hill from ours).  I made a pretty good save (if I do say so myself), diving to my right, making the stop, and covering up the ball while lying on the ground.  One of the other team’s forwards proceeded to kick me in the left ear.  Was it intentional?  Maybe.  I think it was in that grey area: not really intended, but he could have jumped over me pretty easily. 

A moment later, there was a referee’s whistle.  Any thoughts I might have had about a delayed foul call against the guy who kicked me soon vanished.  That dude did get punished, though… just not in the way I’d contemplated.  One of my fullbacks, who happened to be a linebacker on the varsity football team, didn’t take kindly to seeing his friend and teammate kicked in the head, especially by someone from that team… so he body-slammed the guy.  Yeah, he got the equivalent of a red card.  I appreciated the gesture, but would have preferred not to have played the rest of the game a man down.  (To be honest, I don’t remember if we ultimately won.  I think so, though.)

Revenons à nos moutons…  It’s difficult to say whether the red card against Balogun was considered legitimate by objective and knowledgeable viewers.  The folks on Fox thought not, but it’s difficult to say where the line between neutrality and jingoism is drawn.  It’s worth noting that the British newspaper The Guardian described the play as “a seemingly innocuous challenge” and the red card as “widely condemned as extremely harsh.”  And the quality of the officiating in general has been, to put it politely, somewhat less than what would be appropriate for an event of this magnitude.  The France/Paraguay match may be the most egregious example, but it’s not alone.

Balogun, to his credit, reacted to the suspension about as professionally as he possibly could have: “It’s important for me to say, first and foremost, it was totally unintentional.  The choice of the referee was his choice. I don’t think it was the correct choice. I think a yellow card would’ve been fair, due to it not being intentional….  It’s something that happened; we have to move forward, and I have to accept it.”  Elsewhere, he says, “There’s still lots of people we’re inspiring, little kids, boys and girls who are watching, and we have to show them the correct way to handle things, even when you think it’s unjust.”  He’s a class act.

According to FIFA (the Fédération Internationale de Football Association) rules, such suspensions cannot be appealed.  Uh huh.  Yesterday, FIFA announced that the ban against Balogun had been suspended for a year.  The rationale was not clearly stated, at least not in any place Curmie has been able to find.  It’s presumed that the misuse of VAR was the determinant (fig leaf?).  If you put enough modifiers on the change of direction, it’s unprecedented.  It’s the first time since the next-game suspension rule was put in place that a player did not, in fact, have to sit out the next game for a red card in a World Cup game per se.  There was a case in 1962 (before that rule), and a number of players, including Portuguese star Cristiano Ronaldo, have been granted suspended sentences, as it were, for red cards in international competitions held before the World Cup got underway.

Needless to say, FIFA, the organization Curmie once described as “The perfect blend of corruption, arrogance, incompetence, sexism, and boorishness” bears a lot of responsibility.  The sexism isn’t as foregrounded in this Men’s World Cup (Curmie’s earlier comments were linked to the 2015 Women’s World Cup), but the other descriptors are certainly on display. 

The situation is complicated further by the intervention of Donald Trump into the whole business.  His phone call(s?) to FIFA Head Honcho Gianni Infantino may have been simply a political leader sticking up for his nation’s team, but you can be certain, Gentle Reader, that the rest of the world won’t see it that way, especially after that utterly bizarre “FIFA Peace Prize” nonsense a few months ago.  Of course, Trump felt it necessary to brag about his intrusion into the process, thereby intensifying the suspicions of everyone who isn’t, well, American... and plenty of us who are. It’s also worth noting the irony that Balogun wouldn’t be playing for the US at all except for the birthright citizenry Trump seeks to overturn.  La la, how the life goes on.

Even Sepp Blatter, the former Exalted Poobah of FIFA, and one of the most loathsome creatures ever to slither across the planet’s surface, argues that “Red cards are not overturned by political phone calls. They are overturned by rules, evidence and independent bodies.  If a U.S. President intervenes with the FIFA President—and a player is suddenly cleared before a World Cup knockout match—the question is unavoidable: Quo vadis, FIFA?  Football must never become a playground for political power.”  True, Blatter is not the best spokesperson for such an argument, but he does have a point.

Tonight’s US match is against Belgium, whose coach, Rudi Garcia, and the Royal Belgian Football Association [RBFA] aren’t thrilled that their team will now face an American squad at full strength instead of one missing its greatest goal-scoring threat.  Garcia brought out the snark: “I didn’t know that 5 July was equal to 1 April at FIFA.”  Part of the Belgian complaint sounds whiny, however much they say they’re protecting the sanctity of the game rather than their own interests.  They do have a point, however, that they prepared for three days for tonight’s game with the assurance that Balogun wouldn’t play, so their entire defensive strategy has to be revised on short notice.

UEFA (the Union of European Football Associations) issued a statement which pulls no punches.  Here’s part of it:

Sometimes rules are open to interpretation. In this case not. A minimum automatic suspension of one match following a red card is not a discretionary option and does not require the decision of a competent body to be enacted. It is a principle embedded in regulations, which cannot be made subject to exceptions, let alone in the middle of a tournament where several other players have been in the same situation and regularly served their suspension…. We express our disbelief at such an unprecedented, incomprehensible and unjustifiable decision.

Tell us how you really feel, guys…

Former England star Wayne Rooney calls the reversal “an absolute disgrace” and “wrong in every way,” but he makes the further point that had FIFA lifted the red card altogether, which he calls “probably the right decision,” things would be different.  But leaving it while postponing the suspension is sort of the worst of both worlds.

There are plenty of other expressions of dismay, but… as a dear friend and former colleague was wont to say, “What is, is.”  Balogun will almost certainly play.  It would be a display of extraordinary sportsmanship were he not to do so, and that Instagram post with Michael Jackson’s “Bad” playing over the top certainly suggests that he’ll be in the lineup.  He will no doubt be booed by opposing fans for a situation he didn’t create.  Previously neutral fans will flock to whoever is playing the US.  Belgium will seek to appeal, but will almost certainly be unsuccessful.  Should the US prevail over Belgium, especially if Balogun plays a significant role, it and any subsequent success will be tainted.

Curmie finds himself agreeing with ESPN’s Mark Ogden that, as the headline says, “Nobody benefits from FIFA letting Balogun off the hook—not even the USMNT.”  The integrity of the competition is compromised, and “Who wants to win if victory becomes tainted by murky interventions that take place without any explanation or transparency?”

As US soccer fans, the best we can hope for is for an American victory in which Balogun is a non-factor—that we get goals from Christian Pulisic or Tim Weah or Weston McKennie or whoever… or a 0-0 draw going to a shootout the US wins despite Balogun missing his shot.  Not that Curmie wouldn’t be happy to see Flo get a hat trick, but it would be weird.

EDIT: It’s now Tuesday morning, and the US team got convincingly thumped last night.  Belgium was probably the better team.  They were certainly smarter, better-coached, and more prepared for the moment.  One suspects that the fact that they felt aggrieved by the FIFA reversal added to their resolve.  Would the US have fared better had the Balogun suspension not been reversed?  Probably, as they would have been the side that had been wronged by a bad call instead of the one benefitting from political interference.  

Would they have lost, anyway?  Probably.  But they’re unlikely to have been that sluggish, sloppy, and stupid.  It was embarrassing.  One of Curmie’s friends wrote that “Everything Trump touches turns to shit.”  Let’s just say there is little evidence to the contrary.

Pussy Riot Returns for Some Global Face-Time

It’s been a while since Pussy Riot were making headlines, and nearly six years since Curmie wrote about them except in passing. Curmie watched the documentary “Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer” a while back, but had otherwise all but forgotten their existence. Well, they never went away, and they just made headlines again, although the linkage between group and event came rather after the fact.

The best moment of the World Cup?  Just maybe.

Those of us who watched the World Cup final between France and Croatia also saw Pussy Riot at work, although most of us didn’t know it. The group has claimed responsibility for the pitch invasion early in the second half of the match. 

Television cameras cut away from the events on the field and the announcers muttered about the intrusion into the game (Curmie will hope it was only because they assumed the four people who ran onto the pitch were quotidian attention-seekers), especially as Croatia was mounting a counter-attack which just might have turned into a scoring opportunity. (And given that both of France’s first-half goals in a 4-2 victory were at least arguably the product of bad refereeing, that lost opportunity must have been especially galling for the Croats.) Olga Kurachyova, one of the protesters, apologized for interrupting the game: “It is a pity that we disrupted the sportsmen,” she said, but added that “FIFA is involved in unfair games unfortunately. FIFA is a friend of heads of states who carry out repression, who violate human rights.”

Indeed, two things need to be noted here. First, FIFA (the Fédération Internationale de Football Association) may be the only organization in the world as corrupt as the Russian government. Second, coverage of the Cup, at least in the several games Curmie saw, mentioned nary a word about how repressive the Russian régime really is, but there was plenty of ooh-ing and aah-ing about what a great tournament this was and how magnificent the facilities are. Coupled with President Trump’s clinging to his bromance with Putin despite increasing evidence that Russia did indeed meddle in the last US Presidential election, this whitewashed view of a country, or rather of a political machine run by a former KGB apparatchik, is more than a little disturbing.

Of course, few if any spectators knew that the pitch invaders were actually political protesters until after the fact. The four protestors didn’t fit with our (or at least with Curmie’s) presuppositions about Pussy Riot. Contrary to what Curmie had come to expect, they weren’t masked, they were wearing costumes (police uniforms), and there was a man included in the quartet of pitch-invaders. Turns out he’s Pyotr Verzilov, described by ABC (that’s the Australian Broadcasting Corporation) as “one of the group’s most prominent members,” not least because he is the husband of Nadya Tolokonnikova, one of the three Pussy Riot members sentenced to two years in prison for the protest at the Moscow Cathedral in 2012 (she was released after serving about 17 months).

On the other hand, the World Cup final is always one of the world’s most-watched events. Curmie can’t yet find final viewership numbers, but recent history suggests that once you add everyone watching at home and everyone watching in a bar or a watch party, close to a billion people are likely to be watching at any given moment. And whereas some television networks cut away as soon as the disturbance was noticed, others apparently did not. Moreover, Pussy Riot’s claim of responsibility seems to have made headlines around the world (well, not so much in the US, which cares little about soccer and less about how foreign governments treat their citizens).

Lest there be any question about what Pussy Riot was up to, here is the video released by the group upon announcing their responsibility. Since they (or someone) was kind enough to supply subtitles, Curmie will transcribe their commentary:

Dear friend! Perhaps you know that there is no rule of law in Russia, and any policeman may easily break into your life for no reason. FIFA World Cup demonstrated really well how good Russian policemen may behave. But what will happen once it ends?

The conclusion and the solution is the only one—you should fight for preventing fabrication of criminal accusations and arresting people for no reason. In order for this to happen you need one thing called political competition. A possibility to participate in your own country’s life and be elected—for everyone. All of these are very simple things. But you should decide for yourself what you personally can do, so that *your* Russia would become much more beautiful. 

And one more thing. Today is 11 years since the death of the poet Prigov. And he became part of Russian Culture with a cycle of poems about a policeman. Read about him.

Well, our guys are waiting for us on the football match, where we should tell everyone about the heavenly policeman and about the earthly policeman. And also a couple of important demands that you will see at the end of this video. Something about these two policemen is written in this video’s description below. [You can see the translated text of this statement here.]. Well, see you later, my friend. [Curmie has regularized some of the punctuation, but tried to keep everything else unchanged.]

This is the first half or so of the whole video. It is very strange, indeed. The three speakers, presumably the three women who stormed the field, are wearing police uniforms and sitting in an apartment with stuffed animals in the background; all three talk, but they’re all reading from a prepared script. One wears a balaclava; a second puts one on in the middle of the message; the third spends a good deal of time preening for the camera. Color Curmie confused by all of this, but what they say shouldn’t get lost in the clutter of other images.

The video then moves on to an extended clip of the group’s on-pitch activities, including a double high-five (high ten?) between Pussy Riot’s Veronika Nikulshina and French striker Kylian Mbappe (more on this later) before she was literally dragged off the field by security personnel.

Finally, an animated cat (get it? pussy?) appears on the screen with Pussy Riot’s demands:

When the earthly policeman enters the game, we demand to:

1. Let all political prisoners free.

2. Not imprison for “likes.”

3. Stop illegal arrests on rallies.

4. Allow political competition in the country.

5. Not fabricate criminal accusations and not keep people in jail for no reason.

6. Turn the earthly policeman into the heavenly policeman.

These objectives are, as might be expected, simultaneously noble, idealistic, romantic, and naïve. More importantly, they are chilling. Far too many of the problems these goals seek to remedy are creeping into American life. OK, I’d like to think we have few if any political prisoners. But whereas liking a Facebook post might not get you arrested, it could get you fired (and have that firing be upheld by the courts) or suspended from school; these would seem to be first cousins of actual arrest.

“Illegal arrests at rallies” is a loaded term, but I suspect that a lot of objective people would say that something very akin to that has happened not infrequently—Curmie is thinking of the #Occupy movement of a few years ago; those on the other side of the political fence would no doubt cite other, no less relevant, examples.

As for political competition… The Electoral College has gone in a different direction than the popular vote in two of the last three Presidential elections that didn’t involve an incumbent. California has one electoral vote per roughly 720,000 inhabitants; Wyoming one per roughly 190,000. Of course, if you don’t live in one of the dozen or so states which legitimately could go either way in a Presidential election, you have no real say at all. N.B., this is not to suggest that the elections of Presidents G. W. Bush or Trump were tainted; their opponents knew the rules. The Electoral College may be anachronistic and ultimately undemocratic, but it is the way of the world, and candidates need to plan and campaign accordingly. Both Al Gore and Hillary Clinton were bad candidates who ran bad campaigns; they, and the party bosses who ensured their nominations, bear full responsibility for their defeats.

Gerrymandering is endemic, to the point where in 2012 Democrats got 1,400,000 more votes than the Republicans for the House of Representatives but still had a 21 vote deficit in actual elected reps. Competitive elections still happen, but the odds are often stacked, and the results aren’t necessarily an accurate representation of the electorate’s wishes.

We in this country are seldom jailed “for no reason,” but you’re likely to be jailed longer for the same crime if you happen to be poor or black or Latinx or Muslim. Meanwhile, lying little shits like the Brock Turners of the world whine about how abused they are. We’re not Russia, but we’re closer than we should be.

Pussy Riot’s complaints are real, and they served as a useful reminder that Russia is a much uglier place than their government, or FIFA, or indeed Fox Sports, would have us believe. As Masha Gessen writes in The New Yorker,

… Pussy Riot became the only people to make a meaningful statement about Russian politics during the World Cup—and it came on the eve of Vladimir Putin’s triumphant meeting with Donald Trump. They also created, on one of the biggest stages in the world, an image of unjust and arbitrary authority, the sort with which a hundred and forty-five million Russians live day to day.

Before we close, though: the moment that several have called the highlight of the Cup. During the charge onto the field, protester Veronika Nikulshina swerved and headed towards French star Kylian Mbappe. Mbappe was named the tournament’s best young player after becoming the first teenager since Pele 60 years ago to score in a World Cup final. He is widely believed to be the sport’s next global superstar.

But while most of the players on both sides ignored the interruption and Croatian defender Dejan Lovren actively assisted in apprehending the protesters, Mbappe made eye contact. Was Mbappe curious? apprehensive? foolish? Did the fact that Ms. Nikulshina is a very attractive young woman matter? Did she know she was approaching a budding international celebrity? Did he know she was a protester rather than a garden variety hooligan? Or did they both somehow sense that they were granted a huge opportunity to help each other out? Curmie has no answers. But he does know this: that moment, the one you see in the photo at the top of this piece, will remain an enduring part of this World Cup. Fans loved it, and Mbappe was widely cheered for his actions. He was already a hero in more ways than one—both for his heroics on the field and for donating his entire World Cup earnings—over half a million dollars—to charity because he doesn’t think he should be paid to represent his country. His double high-five with Nikulshina was the icing on his good-guy cake.

Meanwhile, the interaction with Mbappe got Nikulshina and her colleagues a lot more publicity than the pitch invasion per se ever would have on its own. There was another benefit: the increased publicity made it difficult for the Russian authorities to come down as hard on the protesters as they might otherwise have done. Seriously, check out the grin on Nikulshina’s face when she hears her sentence (it’s at about the 30 second mark in the top video): 15 days imprisonment and a ban from attending sporting events for three years. Given the sentence Pussy Riot members received for the event at Moscow Cathedral, it certainly could have been worse. She also notes that Mbappe was “fantastic,” and that she thinks the interaction “brought luck to his team.” Well, the French side did score two very quick insurance goals, one by Mbappe himself, in very short order after the encounter. Just sayin’.

It would require a flight of fancy to believe that Mbappe was thinking about anything but football when he sent a right-footed shot screaming into the back of the net only 10 minutes or so after high-fiving Nikulshina, and there was no suggestion that “this goal is for Veronika,” or anything like that. Still, whatever we may think of Pussy Riot’s tactics, their cause is just and their valor is unquestioned. And young Mr. Mbappe seems to be an exceptional person as well as an exceptional athlete. Perhaps a little karma just might have been involved. If so, here’s hoping that it continues.

UPDATE: In other Pussy Riot news today, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Russia was wrong to jail the three Pussy Riot women from the 2012 protest at the Moscow Cathedral, and ordered Russia to pay some $57,000 in damages to Maria Alyokhina, Nadya Tolokonnikova, and Yekaterina Samutsevich.