Canada, ‘heartfelt apologies’ and a spy story that has lit up Olympic football
SORRY SEEMS TO BE THE EASIEST WORD
Canadians are very good at saying sorry. There is perhaps something, deep in the national psyche, of a Britishness there, and maybe also for the need to separate themselves from Americans, who are much more likely to adopt the John Wayne school of thought: “Never apologise, mister, it’s a sign of weakness.” Such is the rate at which Canadians are inclined to apologise that the province of Ontario even introduced the Apology Act in 2009, a law created as a measure to give lawyers a fair chance defending clients who were never guilty but apologised to the aggrieved all the same, stipulating that apologies do not necessarily constitute an admission of guilt.
Of course, that’s not to say that Canadians are always innocent. Just ask their women’s soccer team, who took the Olympic motto of “faster, higher, stronger” a little too literally on the eve of their opening match at Paris 2024, after being caught red-handed flying a drone to record two separate training sessions of their opponents, New Zealand, before Thursday’s curtain raiser. New Zealand’s Olympic Committee “immediately reported the incident to police, leading to the drone operator, who has been identified as a support staff member of the wider Canadian Women’s football team, to be detained”, who has since been named as Joseph Lombardi, “an unaccredited analyst”. Despite only saying sorry when they were caught, rather than voluntarily getting out in front of the story, Canada went full Leslie Knope, issuing two separate statements with all the sincerity and fervour of a deputy director of the parks and recreation department being caught with one hand in the gift basket.
“Heartfelt apologies” have been issued to New Zealand, Lombardi and Jasmine Mander, “an assistant coach to whom Mr Lombardi reports to”, has been sent home, while Bev Priestman, Canada’s head coach, has voluntarily withdrawn herself from coaching the match on Thursday as “a commitment to integrity and accountability”, although she will remain in France for the rest of the Olympics. Just how New Zealand found, detained and identified the operator and drone as Canadian remain unexplained, with reports that Lombardi was stood on the side of the training pitch wearing a red-and-white tracksuit, eating poutine and singing ‘My Spying Will Go On’ to the tune of Céline Dion’s greatest hit said to be wide of the mark.
This is all quite the contrast to football’s last Spygate, when a member of Marcelo Bielsa’s backroom staff at Leeds, equipped with pliers, binoculars and disguised clothing, was found outside Derby County’s training ground in 2019. Not only did Bielsa do his best Larry David impression in squirming out of a sincere apology, he admitted in an extraordinary 70-minute press conference to the world’s media, supported by a PowerPoint presentation and reams of tactical evidence, that he had “observed all the rivals we played against and watched the training sessions of all opponents”. So while New Zealand do have legitimate grievances, maybe they should just be grateful that they got an apology at all.
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QUOTE OF THE DAY
Sheriff were about to play at Braga in the Europa League when my son called and told me what had happened. After the game, I went to my home town of Zaporizhzhia and started to defend my homeland. Yes, I was 56 at the time, but there were a lot of people like me. The average age in our unit was about 48. I was responsible for providing ammunition for the artillery in the Dnipropetrovsk region. The Russians made progress and our goal was to stop them. When we completed our missions, we went backwards, and the infantry took our place. That is how it continued for three and a half months until June 2022” – Yuriy Vernydub speaks to Michael Yokhin about his remarkable double-life as manager of Kryvbas Kryvyi Rih and leader of a squadron trying to defeat Russia in the Ukraine war.
FOOTBALL DAILY LETTERS
Usually the tea timely email’s normally low standards are kept clear from the letters section, so I can only assume nobody could be bothered to put finger to keyboard, unless of course you’re trying to instil a high bar. A chance for the letters editor (using the term extremely loosely) to give some poor trier a moment of pre season glory goes begging, before the reality of a season of Noble Francis kicks in. So much for the underdog getting their five minutes of fame” –Kevin Worley.
Re: the picture accompanying the bit about Beto (Tuesday’s Quote of the Day). I saw the name Money on the back of the Sligo player’s shirt and figured football was at last stating the obvious. Until I looked a second time” – Martin Foster.
Nice photo of Bobby Moore at West Ham’s Chadwell Heath training ground (Tuesday’s Memory Lane – full email edition). That was about the time my all-girls secondary school played hockey on an adjoining pitch. Footballers were all old blokes then, and we used to see Geoff Hurst in Tesco” – Rochelle Libson.
Did Eddie Howe really say ‘I’d welcome Anthony back with three arms if I had them?’ Why stop at three? Why not go for the full insect or octopus greeting? Anyone who only gets a two-armed welcome now at Newcastle is going to feel like an outsider” – Dan J Levy.
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