Find the main information of the day on the FIFA World Cup in Qatar on the second day of the competition.
The day after the first match of the World Cup in Qatar, the host country wakes up with a taste of fiasco in the mouth, three matches are on the program and a new controversy around an armband promoting inclusiveness is on its way.
Matches of the day
The “One Love” armband remains in the locker room
If the FFF shines with its lack of courage on the front of homophobia, other federations have decided to move, a little. This Monday, captains Harry Kane (England), Virgil van Dijk (Netherlands) and Gareth Bale (Wales) were due to start their tournament wearing a “One Love” rainbow armband, a symbol of the fight against the various forms of discrimination, in particular against LGBT people. An initiative not to the taste of FIFA, which recalled this weekend that yellow cards could be distributed by the referees to players wearing the armband from the start, as written The Telegraph.
A stroke of pressure which produced its effects: in a joint declaration, seven federations announced this Monday morning to give up the armband. “FIFA has been very clear, they will impose sporting sanctions if our captains wear the armbands on the pitch. As national federations, we cannot ask our players to risk sporting sanctions, including yellow cards”, write the federations of Germany, England, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Wales and Switzerland. France, initially a member of the “One Love” initiative, had already announced through the voice of its captain Hugo Lloris that it would not wear the armband.
Otherwise, the English players have planned to kneel before the kick-off of their match against Iran, this Monday at 2 p.m. Through this gesture popularized by American football player Colin Kaepernick as part of the Black Lives Matter movement, the Three Lions players intend to promote “inclusivity” in the broad sense, as coach Gareth Southgate explained at a press conference.
An interview with Lloris censored by the FFF?
The idea was to make a clip against homophobia in football. But the video, whose images date from March 2022, was never released. And this, according to Stop on Images, perhaps because the words of Hugo Lloris were not really up to par. Asked about homophobic insults in football, the captain of the France team replied: “It’s folklore, football, it’s part of the decor, the fans who sleep in… If need be, we can use it as additional motivation”. A justification regularly used in the world of football, which tends to take the subject lightly. But this time, the FFF seems to have decided not to release the interview to avoid a new controversy. Missed.
picture of the day
sentence of the day
“My grandmother’s was excellent. My mother took over the recipe. His tiramisu is divine, perfectly dosed.”
— Striker Olivier Giroud, interviewed in “Le Parisien” on Monday. Later, he quotes a verse from the Bible. Divine, we tell you.
In opening, Qatar offers a cold shower in the desert
And suddenly, embarrassment fell on Qatar. Faced with a very modest team from Ecuador (44th in the FIFA rankings), the selection of the host country lost Sunday at the opening of the World Cup (0-2) in a meeting where the yellow cards (6) will have outnumbered shots on target (3, all Ecuadorian). A double from Enner Valencia in thirty minutes – which could have been a hat-trick if the video assistance to the referee had not interfered – and the match was over. This poor spectacle took place in front of very calm stands at first, then completely sparse in the second half, many Qatari supporters having left the stadium from the sixtieth minute. Reason invoked: it’s too cold (true) and anyway, the selection loses. All after a somewhat awkward opening ceremony shunned by celebrities. Our story of this first evening.
Date of the day
Before the start of the World Cup in Qatar, only 6 host countries out of 22 managed to win the supreme trophy on their soil. And their course in the competition is sometimes interrupted well before the final.
How far will Iran go in terms of protest?
As Iran begins its competition this Monday at 2 p.m. against England, what to expect from its players on the extra-sporting level? When we went to see the two players selected by the Iranian team on Thursday to speak to the press for the first time in Doha, tracksuit jackets pulled up to the top and glares, we did not know what to expect. Were we going to find two men ready to talk politics, as some of their teammates have already done in recent weeks, and to use the World Cup as a media springboard when, at home, a good thousand kilometers from there, a popular uprising makes the Islamic Republic waver? Or would they stay on the traditional “the important thing is to focus on football” carefully avoiding answering questions?