Samba de Baiano wrote:If Milan win expect the tabloid journos to winge about how Milan shouldn't have been in the Champion's League because of the match-fixing scandal.
Well, that sort of thing has already started.
It reminds me of the World Cup:
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http://football.guardian.co.uk/championsleague200607/story/0,,2084139,00.html
The loophole that allowed Milan to take Athens road
Calciopoli scandal should have resulted in the Rossoneri being barred from Europe this season
Richard Williams
Monday May 21, 2007
The Guardian
Pat Crerand believes the players of Milan should not be travelling to Athens this week in their attempt to gain revenge for their defeat by Liverpool in the Champions League final two years ago. To the former Manchester United and Scotland wing-half, the punishment inflicted on the Italian club for their part in last summer's referee-influencing scandal ought to have included their automatic disqualification from the competition, and he believes he has history on his side.
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His mind goes back to a May night in 1969, when Milan arrived at Old Trafford for the second leg of the European Cup semi-final needing only to protect a 2-0 lead from the first leg at San Siro in order to dismiss the holders.
United had pulled one goal back after 70 minutes, through Bobby Charlton, when Crerand hit a cross from the byline that his colleagues believed had been prodded over the line by Denis Law before Mario Anquilletti, Milan's right- back, scooped it back into play.
"We knew it had crossed the line," Crerand said yesterday. "And even if it hadn't been a goal, it would have been a penalty because Anquilletti used his hand to pull it back. But the French referee saw nothing. We thought there was something going on."
Indeed, Roger Machin, the official in question, waved away United's furious protests and allowed play to continue. He had already had to cope with a five-minute delay while Fabio Cudicini, Milan's goalkeeper, regained consciousness after being hit on the head by a missile thrown from the Stretford End.
In Crerand's view, however, the official's refusal to allow a United equaliser was part of a dark and disturbing pattern that resulted, only last summer, in Milan being punished for an attempt to influence the selection of referees for their matches in the Italian league.
"I don't think they should be in the final," said Crerand, who now works for Manchester United's TV station. "It's the top club competition in Europe and one of the teams shouldn't be there. I think it's unfair. Milan shouldn't be there the same way that West Ham shouldn't be in the Premier League. It doesn't send out a very good message to the rest of football, does it? And this wasn't a one-off in Italy. It's been going on for years. I think they were getting at the referees when I was playing, too. In the first leg in 1969 we had some funny decisions. And we certainly thought the same in the second leg."
Crerand also mentioned the scandal of 1973, when Brian Clough's Derby County were denied a place in the European Cup final by a Juventus team whose general manager was later exposed, thanks to investigations by Brian Glanville of the Sunday Times, as having attempted to influence referees. The Golden Fix, as it became known, led to no serious investigation but its echoes were to be detected in scandals of later years.
Milan's involvement in match-fixing goes back to 1980 and the Totonero investigation into a betting ring found them guilty of bribing players and officials. After finishing third the previous season, Milan were punished by being relegated to Serie B, along with Lazio. Their president, Felice Colombo, was given a life ban, while three players received disqualifications of between four years and six months.
Last summer, Milan were implicated in the Calciopoli scandal, which began when phone-taps revealed the general manager of Juventus, Luciano Moggi, had been attempting to control the selection of officials for Serie A matches. Moggi's club suffered the harshest punishment, being stripped of their league title and relegated to Serie B, but Milan - along with Lazio and Fiorentina - were also found guilty of lesser charges.
In Milan's case, their refeering liaison officer, a restaurateur from Lodi called Leonardo Meani, was said to have made incriminating phone calls, one of which was to Gennaro Mazzei, the Italian Football Association's [FIGC] head of linesmen, after Milan had lost 2-1 to Siena. Meani criticised the appointment of one linesman in forthright terms: "I don't want him. I never asked for him nor wanted him." And he added a request for their next match: "On Wednesday, try to send two intelligent ones."
Although the charges were on a much smaller scale than those levelled against Moggi and Juventus, they were nevertheless enough to incur a retrospective deduction of 44 points from the total with which Milan had earned second place in Serie A in the 2005-06 season, plus an advance deduction of 15 points from the present season. On appeal, however, these were lowered to 30 points and eight respectively, the former being just enough to put them in third position, ensuring them a place in last August's qualifying round of the Champions League, while the latter made inclusion in next year's tournament a realistic ambition.
For Juventus, being erased from the final table of the 2005-06 season meant they would automatically be excluded from the Champions League and many felt the same punishment should be inflicted on the other clubs involved in the scandal. At the headquarters of Uefa, however, it was discovered that the governing body's rules did not allow it to override the decisions of a national association. If the FIGC deemed Milan fit to represent them, there was nothing that could be done.
"It was very simple," William Gaillard, Uefa's head of communications, told me. "Our executive committee could only take up the matter after the Italian sentences were confirmed, because there were many appeals. The Italian association sent us their list of clubs, which included Milan. Some of the committee had misgivings about the situation, but when we examined our statutes and regulations we saw that we could not do anything about it because, in matters such as this, the national association was sovereign.
"The only possibility was to change our statutes, and that was done at our congress in Düsseldorf in January. Now we have the power to intervene. If a team has been game-fixing or affecting results, and if the case is sufficiently grave, Uefa will be able to exclude them."
Welcome as the change may be, it came several months too late to exclude Milan from this year's competition, which they are now the bookmakers' favourites to win for a seventh time on Wednesday. And there are those, such as Crerand, who will find it difficult to take comfort from the knowledge that, at least on paper, things will be different in the future.
"They're a smashing team, Milan, and maybe they didn't know what was going on," Crerand concluded. "Or would some of them have known? You'd have to ask them. Obviously the players want to win the top trophy, but if you do it unfairly, is it worth it?"
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