Dirty and dishonest still they are the best!

By John Cheeran
Italy have the looks of the World Cup champions.
Amazing, isn't it?
In India we have a fancy for the system. We blame all our football ills on the lack of a perfect system. The naive must be having a picture of a football factory that puts together the likes of Zidanes and Ronaldinhos and Riquelmes.
We blame corrupt and incompetent officials for Indian football not making enough progress. But never blame the players!
Even in cricket, India's inability in not regaining the World Cup has been put down to the flaws in the system.
Flaws in the system? Italian football is in the midst of its worst crisis.
A club as illustrious as Juventus is starting at relegation. Club officials and match officials together with others were part of a corrupt system which saw improper selection of referees and others. The match officials are being investigated for behaving less than impartially on the field. Former executives at Juventus are alleged to be at the centre and Fiorentina and AC Milan and Lazio are the other clubs involved.
A report in Financial Times said: It is a scandal of hitherto unknown middlemen, whose actions have not been traced definitively either up to the top or down to the players.
The point is that the miasma of the match-fixing scandal has not affected Italy's performance on the biggest stage of football, the World Cup.
How such a rotten system can inspire footballers?
Does the dishonesty that led to the fixing of matches not leave any impression on the players and the national team?
May be with the noose tightening around those who are involved in the scandal and with the Sports Tribunal delaying its verdict to get the World Cup out of its way, players are giving all they have, to prove that they are the best in the world.
You can be dirty, dishonest and yet you can be the best. That's the secret of sport.
There should not be any dichotomy in this. Football itself has become a field for trickery by players and error-laden decisions by referees. So where does honesty figure in this? No where.
Football is not about being honest, but winning.
World Cup is not a test for the system but for players and their skills.Winning depends on players; not in having a clean system and administration to run the game. It takes guts and gumption to survive the 90 or 120 minutes of madness, beauty and brutality.
And winners take it all. Fix the rivals, the Italians must be barking.