Congratulations are in order to AC Mafia for winning this season's Champions League Final despite originally not having qualified for the tournament due to their role in calciocaos. Galliani going up to receive the trophy with the Milan players while Berlusconi modestly applauded while sitting next to Blatter seems a thoroughly fitting finale to the season.
The match included most of the reasonings behind our starting of this blog focusing on corruption in football. The power abuse by Milan gave them a totally unmerited place not only in Europe's premier competition but also in Serie A. Milan were as guilty as Juventus in the fixing of Italian matches and should also have been relegated but the Agnelli's are not as powerful as Blair's buddy Berlusconi.
The poor organisation, unsuitable playing surface, rampant ticket touting, pre and post match rioting and a match featuring two teams who only had eleven truly competitive games all season due to their forced or strategic focus on the Champions League produced a very moderate occasion.
Liverpool's team selection was non astute. Why it took Benitez so long to realise than Zenden is an entirely overrated liability is beyond me but the Liverpool manager was not helped by the creative officiating of Herbie Fandel. If you can be bothered, check through the ninety minutes action and monitor the German's refereeing of Dirk Kuyt and Zenden. Modern day strategic management requires real time profiling of the power individual's hidden agendas and Germany's Fandel evidently has a problem with the Netherlands. Additionally, substitutions and injuries in the second half should have resulted in a minimum of four minutes injury time plus a little extra for Milan's 91st minute substitution. By blowing the whistle fully one minute forty five seconds early, Fandel imposed a further proprietary restriction on the game in addition to his allowance of Inzaghi's handled opening goal. Fandel should never have been provided with the kudos of officiating such a major game anyway following his inflammatory performance in the 1st leg of the Roma versus Man Utd Quarter Final.
This degree of influence has to be taken away from the referees and the game also needs further meritocratisation with the onset of technology as the match was characterised by numerous incorrect offside decisions. Blatter refuses to actively support technology unless it is 100% perfect which is an effective way of allowing the corruption to continue. This 100% threshold is bandied about as if the referees and their assistants are currently achieving some similarly high percentage of correctness in their decision making. Not so. If four out of ten offside decisions are incorrect even technology that is only able to reduce this to 3 out of 10 is to be welcomed and, yet, we firmly believe a level of 95% plus is possible without any great scientific breakthrough.
