Originally Posted by
jackal2
I'm always embarrassed by the England fans doing it, and it's no more acceptable from the Italians. Cheer and boo as much as you like during the game itself, but disrespecting the national anthems betrays a basic lack of class. It demeans only the perpetrators.
On the wider subject of the qualifiers, is it just me who is finding the refereeing of some of these games inept to the point of being suspicious? As an Englishman I've got no bias towards any of the other nations, but in both of Northern Ireland's games against Switzerland, and in three halves of Italy versus Sweden I've seen so far, there seems to have been an extraordinary number of key decisions not going for Northern Ireland and Sweden.
I don't usually go in for conspiracy theories, but it does seem to me that the comparatively illustrious nations are getting the lions' share of the decisions. Perhaps it's my imagination, but we do know that FIFA is, to put it very politely, not exactly squeaky clean when it comes to behind the scenes influence and commercial considerations. Even before the games started, there was the rather dubious practice of seeding certain teams for the play-offs, based on the ever-contentious FIFA ranking system, which seems unnecessary and unfair when all 2nd-placed teams have surely earned equal right to benefit (or not) from the luck of the draw.