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Australia's Craig Foster under fire for using WWI to urge France to World Cup victory

Craig Foster
SBS’s Craig Foster tweeted to France about their next World Cup game that ‘diggers fought in great numbers’ in the war and ‘now we need your best’. Photograph: Mark Metcalfe/Getty Images

The SBS football analyst Craig Foster has come under fire for a series of social media posts invoking a bloody battle of the first world war to urge France to victory in a World Cup match.

After Australia were held to a draw by Denmark on Thursday, their World Cup fate does not lie entirely in their hands. To progress to the knockout stage, Bert van Marwijk’s side must beat Peru in the final round of group matches next week and hope the French defeat Denmark.

Foster, who heads the coverage on SBS and is well-known for his passionate and outspoken views, posted reminders of Australia’s historical military ties with France in several tweets hours after the Denmark game.

“Hello France. Greetings from your Australian friends,” Foster began. “It’s been a while. Sorry we haven’t been in touch more regularly. Friends are like that, but you have always been in our thoughts. There is something we must discuss.

“And it concerns our shared history, specifically 1916. You know of what I speak, the time when French/Australian relations were cemented, forever to come to each other’s aid when we are in need.

“When Australian diggers fought in great numbers in your country in the Great War, sacrificing so many of our young for your freedom. Villers-Bretonneux stands as a monument to our eternal embrace. Now, we need your best on the 26th.”

About 11,000 Australian soldiers died fighting in France and Belgium during the first world war, with 1,200 losing their lives saving the village of Villers-Bretonneux, in what one British general called “perhaps the greatest individual feat of the war”.

Foster was accused by other Twitter users of lacking perspective and branded “disrespectful and tasteless” and “moronic and embarrassing”.

Another Twitter user wrote “It does a disservice to those brave men to equate their sacrifice to a football match.”