France is a very curious nation. Whether in war or in sport, "fair play" has been a very long tradition. Most of the time, it didn't help us a lot, but that's in our culture....
I'm even hearing the possibility that we could replay this match.
This is a very interesting point. Notably, Arsene Wenger insists that the correct decision in this situation is allowing an official rematch.
Wenger urges France to offer Ireland replay | News Archive | News | Arsenal.com
Well, I do not doubt for a second that should have this happened again with nations like Argentina or Italy, everybody would have been pleased and even festive (because everyone knows that Italy's soccer team are the worst cheaters in the world, that's a well established fact).
I have heard and seen many nasty things about the Italian game; from committing egregious fouls in a very subtle manner and feigning an injury in a time-wasting endeavor to fixing matches. You probably know more about this matter than I do, could you expound upon it please. Is dishonesty a notable feature of the Italian cultural values? If so, what are the likely salient causes of this?
France is a very curious nation. Whether in war or in sport, "fair play" has been a very long tradition. Most of the time, it didn't help us a lot, but that's in our culture..
Is the value of fairness specific to French football or is it a reflection of the French cultural values by and large? If so, what are the salient causes of such values?
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Interesting note: The Italian style of gaming appears significantly different from that of other Western nations (e.g England, France, Portugal, Spain, Germany); it is much more conservative. The games on average are tighter and contain fewer goals, and defense is emphasized over offense and midfield play.
This is a tangent, but it seems to me that the Italian football culture is more reminiscent of the Eastern style than the Western. There is something about the mentality of the Eastern Europeans that the main strategy involves the following, nothing more and nothing less: play defense as tightly as possible and wait for your opponent to make a mistake; when they do, make one successful strike on the counter attack, one is all you need as the game should be too tight for more. If the opponent pushes forward aggressively and spreads their defense too thinly, launch another counter-attack, get a second goal: that should be more than enough to bury the game.
The Westerners on the other hand tend to emphasize intricate strategies of using midfielders and forwards to storm the opponent's goal, even at the expense of being scored on due to insufficient care defending.
Obviously the Western nations tend to be more liberal than the Easterners and offer their citizens more leeway with regard to public ethics and professional responsibilities. I wonder if the fact that their style of playing football is more creative and engaging than that of the Easterners is due to their cultural values. Italy is not liberal comparing by Western Standards and economically deprived too.
The fans of the Italians and the Easterners are on average cruder and more violent than that of the Westerners, I'd bet that this is a result of their economic deprivations also. Seems to me that an illiberal, economically deprived country is more likely to endorse ethical values that discount fairness in favor of a philosophy that holds that the ends justify the means. I'd think so because citizens of such nations are too busy fending for their basic needs to be concerned with such lofty things as morality and fairness. Possibly even because they feel demeaned by their immediate surroundings and feel they have something to prove by winning contests by all means necessary. In short, I would conjecture that whether a nation values honesty in sport depends on whether or not the county has honesty as a distinct cultural value. Whether it does, I think depends on its economic circumstances. Countries of poor economic circumstances tend to be result focused and therefore see honesty as less important than results. Result-focused countries (Eastern European) tend to be more conservative in their game out of fear of making mistakes. The fans are cruder and more violent because they tend to feel that the results of the game have a lot to say about their personal dignity; and besides, in their poor economic circumstances they don't have much else that could bring joy to their lives, so a lot more is riding on those games for them than for the French and the other Westerners.
Just a number of thought experiments, I am quite curious about what you'd have to say regarding the main points of my views.