The Cheating Is Out Of Control

All avenues of life are marked with an unsustainable amount of corruption.

Watch any Premier League football game and you will see hundreds of incidents of cheating. Players falling over with the barest of touches; exaggerated reactions; making claims which they know to be false; trying to get opponents sent off by intimidating the referee and so on - actions familiar to anyone who watches football. It is endemic in the game and has been for many years. Due to the fact that kids learn this as they progress through the youth teams. The professional footballers are not only professional footballers; they are professional cheats too.

Having watched this Sunday’s big game - Tottenham Hotspur versus Newcastle United - I was disappointed that two teams, both of whom can play exciting, brilliant football, were continually spoiling the match by their dishonesty. I was sad to come away from the game slightly despising players, who are highly skilled and, when I have watched them in interviews, are quite likable and personable, for their continual methods of deceptions intended to fool the ref and spoil the chances of their opponents. There was dubiety - if there was no ref - about the players having a sense of fair play and were prepared to allow the best team to win. It is sad to think that not only is it eleven highly skilled footballers facing off against each other; it is eleven proficient and prolific cheats trying to out do the other team.

There is no condemnation from the commentators or the pundits that ride shotgun with them in their commentary box. Players are ‘clever’ or ‘smart’ or ‘streetwise’ or ‘it was necessary’ and so on. Outright cheating is completely accepted. Time and time again, exciting moments are spoiled in games as players feign injury from innocuous challenges or just sit down on the grass hoping the referee will disrupt the opponent by stopping the game. The media companies and their employees lack the courage to call someone a cheat in case it tarnishes the image of the product…so they allow cheating to go unchallenged!!

Football is emblematic of society at large. Aside from the fact that children see their heroes act a certain way and then extrapolate on the the turf of their local football pitches (sometimes encouraged by a coach, which is outrageous), there is widescale deception everywhere. It is now widely accepted that the financial markets, the banks, the entire operation of money is rigged, fraudulent and corrupt - but it is the cheating elsewhere that is so remarkable: the embezzlement of money during the Covid Hoax; the payments for injecting experimental vaccines that greedy, amoral doctors and dentists could not get enough of; the billions of pounds worth of claims put in for fake companies and imaginary employees under the COVID-19 support packages (although ordinary people defrauding the government is not the worst thing); the grade inflation of pupil results without exams, during Con-Vid, by the teaching professions - a higher than 20% increase in As. The absenteeism. It’s everywhere. There’s no point even mentioning politics…or charities.

People are not holding themselves or being held to a standard by others in the community. To give them the benefit of the doubt, people might be confused by what exactly those standards are; they’ve become so hazy due to multiple violations and the visible lack of censure of them. However, this environment has been brought about by the fact that too few people cared to stand-up when these breaches occurred.

VAR: Video Assistant Referee is a controversial subject in football now. Incidents are replayed and checked for foul play or an infringement of the rules. Pundits, now, sit around the TV and radio studios bemoaning the fact that it ‘is ruining football’. They forget why it was brought in. Week in, week out, chicanery and deceit were conning referees and causing teams to lose games that could see them banished, for at least a season, from the lucrative honey pot of the top European football leagues, especially the Premier League. Dishonesty paved the way for VAR.

We have to be careful that our own lack of integrity as a society and our own lack of courage in calling for a more high-minded approach does not create a situation that many of the elite would like to see: a video assisting policeman or VAP, aided by artificial intelligence enforcing honesty (the next step in football is artificial intelligence to judge offside). If cheating is normative, even lauded, behaviour, as it was in Ancient Sparta - respect was given to those who were not caught, neatly symbolised by the Spartan boy who stole a fox, hiding it in his toga, and who did not utter a sound that would reveal his crime even as the fox ate away at his stomach and he bled to death - then what would underwrite the trust necessary for all human transactions? A deeply-penetrative, panopticon control system would be demanded. And who could blame decent people for welcoming in such a system if it is intended to combat all the fraud around them? (Of course, it won’t be to stop the large-scale deceptions of the wealthy, just the small ones, along with the corollary actions that are taken to resist oppression and promote freedom.)

To stop the march of bio-tech feudalism, with its need to humiliate us, impoverish us and probably depopulate us, we need a Copernican Revolution in honesty and integrity. If we cannot do something honestly or win something with integrity, then we should accept losing, knowing that the greater ‘win’ is maintaining the truthfulness of our relationships, our communities, our person; and in keeping the soil nutrient-rich, on which freedom grows.