Tonight witnessed one of the great footballing injustices as Thierry Henry's blatant double-handball in Paris gave France an aggregate World Cup play-off victory against Ireland.
Let me set my stall out from the off: there is no situation where cheating in order to gain advantage for your team is acceptable. Doubtless there will be those who, while not condoning Henry's actions, will accept it as part of the game. However, the notion that he did what he did because he had to, and any of us would have done the same is a total fallacy.
There is no excuse for Henry's actions. Some may say that it was an instinctive action, that his arm automatically stretched out to keep the ball in play and as such he is not responsible for those actions. Let me dispel this myth. Handling in order to keep the ball in play is not an instinctive reaction for a footballer. If it was, we'd see it week in, week out in domestic football, but we simply don't. Henry's actions may have played out in a split second, but as a footballer you need less than that time to decide to do something, and Henry clearly made a decision tonight.
Of course this incident will also raise familiar discussions surrounding officials and video replays. That however, is a debate for another day. Tonight there is nothing but a sense of pure injustice on behalf of the Irish who fought so hard and so well, and deserved so much more than to be eliminated by the actions of a cheat.
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