He’ll Never Be Successful Doing That

Via The Offside comes a story of true character and integrity out of Romania. Costin Lazar of Rapid Bucharest was fouled in the box winning a penalty kick from the referee. Yet, Lazar would have none of it. He waved his finger at the ref telling him there was no foul on the play.

And, the ref ruled accordingly. Amazing.

Clearly, Lazar does not have the selfishness, egotism and greed to succeed in a top tier European football league. But, his squad should be immediately awarded a fair play spot in the UEFA Cup Europa Cup.

Fulhamapalooza

Not to beat Eight Belles with this, but, yes, it is another Fulham-UEFA Cup post (to go with this and this).

Of interest is the new Fair Play table.

It has been updated, but only to go back in time. Where it used to say “Matches up to and including 5th May 2008,” it now reads “Matches up to and including 28th April 2008″ (of course even that depends on when you, the reader, click on the link).

Not that you wouldn’t believe us, but after the jump is a screenshot of the cached page.

Anyway you can see the old “newer” date below the “Fair Play Table” heading on the table itself (well, you might need to click on the image to make it large enough so you can see that the FA has indeed mastered time travel).

This presumably means a couple of things. First, the cards from Fulham’s match against Birmingham City (two yellows) come back into play. That’s an automatic minus-two points. Citeh, who played Liverfourth in the penultimate week of the season, had no cards for that match week.

Second, it allows the FA more wiggle room in awarding positive (or negative) points. I’m not insinuating they are up to anything nefarious, but if Fulham does make up the point gap, it looks a lot less suspicious if it happened over a two week period than over a single match. Like the kids say: “I’m not saying, I’m just saying.”

Finally, looking at the table gives us a little insight into the whole idea of whether wikipedia is correct or not with its fan behavio(u)r in the list of criteria. It’s not.

Really, can’t believe none of us thought to actually look at the point breakdown on that table itself but the categories are: “R/Y, P/P, R/O, R/R, B/O” which, respectively, stand for “Red & Yellow Cards, Positive Play, Respect Towards Opponent, Respect Toward Referee, Behavior of Officials.”

Nothing for the fans. So chair-throwing Citeh spectators can breath easy knowing that they didn’t fuck their club. Although the players themselves might have taken care of that for them. Really, losing 8-1 to ‘Boro should disqualify you from anything.

Except maybe playing in MLS.