RUSSIA must be stopped from forcing their way back into football — simple as that.
Vladimir Putin’s attack on Ukraine invalidates a return to humanity and should do so until he removes the troops he unleashed a year ago, who are still causing massive loss of life.
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For football fields, read killing fields. Any government with even a glimmer of morality must support Ukraine and their courageous people.
That goes for all sport. Yet Fifa president Gianni Infantino is showing signs of relenting, while rogue states such as Syria and Iran are cuddling up to the Kremlin.
Even more embarrassingly, Uefa are also said to be considering lifting the suspension, although Russia were not included in the current Euro qualifiers.
Maybe both bodies are looking forward to the conclusion of the war, an eventuality that doesn’t seem to have affected Russian considerations so far, and certainly hasn’t Ukraine’s.
Why should it? The massacres in Ukraine make nonsense of the late Liverpool manager Bill Shankly’s dry half-joke that people think football much more serious than life and death.
Five of the Stans of central Asia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan — once possessions of the Russian empire — have already agreed to play their former landlords.
The whole quintet are in arid, just-about-inhabitable lands so no wonder the Russians weren’t too bothered about handing them independence.
Like them, Syria and Iran are in Fifa.
Indeed, Iran beat Syria in the qualifying rounds for the Qatar World Cup, in which Iran played.
Fifa have to juggle their politics but it would be a breach of responsibility were they to stand at the touchline of the current war and open competition for the evil Putin’s teams.
Putin is the rotten core at the heart of Russia.
But now, incredibly, the IOC are considering whether the country’s athletes should be allowed to compete under the national flag at the Paris Games in 2024.
Lord Sebastian Coe, president of World Athletics, is having none of this. He didn’t win two Olympic golds to watch his sport descend into hypocrisy.
Gianni ‘I feel like a woman’ Infantino has not committed to official Russian entry into the bloated World Cup 2026 in North America.
Football must have nothing to do with the Kremlin until the bombs stop dropping, the kidnapped children are sent home and the tanks trundle back.
Awarded the Russian Order of Friendship, it seems that the friendship might have become less friendly, although not enough for Gianni to return the medal pinned on him by Putin himself in 2019.
Infantino has practically been voted president unanimously (how does he do that?) and continues to see himself as a well-dressed world leader in white shoes with an even whiter reputation.
He failed though when he tried to silence the bloody sounds of war for the month of the Qatar competition.
Gross naivety, gross vanity.
Neither Putin nor Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s leader, appear to have given a moment of thought to a truce.
Putin has all the principles of a starving rat and would have used the month to rebuild his stock of weaponry.
Poor repressed Belarus would have helped and Iran-made drones flown in by the thousand.
Ukraine, the excellent Shakhtar Donetsk and others, continue to play to a background of war.
Football must have nothing to do with the Kremlin until the bombs stop dropping on factories, schools, hospitals and homes, until all the kidnapped children are sent home and until the tanks trundle back over the border.
