SB Nation English Premier League
Amidst suspicion surrounding Newcastle's comeback against Arsenal, SB Nation Soccer Editor Richard Farley saw a change in the way many think about sport.
Feb 7, 2011 - Last night, I got an instant message from a co-worker. It was a link and a thought: This could be big. One click later and I was looking at a sea of tweets. Interpol was investigating the Newcastle-Arsenal match, the users said. Phil Dowd and Tomas Rosicky were implicated, the official and Arsenal midfielder possibly part of a match-fixing scheme, the symptoms spotted by German authorities. Those authorities contacted Interpol, that über-FBI entity that we usually see chasing Jason Bourne. They were going to get to the bottom of Arsenal's incredible capitulation.
It smelled like urban legend, folklore, people seeking to explain the inexplicable. Rather than accept that yes, that comeback could legimitately happen, some wanted to believe the fix was in.It's an Occam's Razor situation, the thinking would hold. What's more likely? That a title-contending team would score four goals in the first 29 minutes only to allow as many to a recent promotee in the last 28? Or, that there was collusion to create the result?
My eyes rolled in disappointment. Naively, I felt ill, for reasons I couldn't articulate until now. Have we been so inundated by match fixing, performance enhancement, and corruption that we can no longer suspend our disbelief long enough to think sports' minor miracles are possible? When the upstart performs unpredictable feats, do we look to defy before we look to embrace? Do we look try to explain why something can't be before we accept that it is? I can't remember the last time I thought something so morose.
Perhaps that's why this post is the first you've heard about this story via SB Nation Soccer, though others within the network had it. Those who jumped on it early saw their Tweets and Likes go bonkers. Whether their tweeters and likers are the morose or curious, the numbers got my attention. Was there more to this story than I had originally, dismissively thought?
Even upon reflection, I found that difficult to believe, as part of my dismissive attitude concerned my understanding of Interpol. So many people were saying Interpol was investigating, but to my knowledge, Interpol gathers and relays information. They act as a conduit between investigatory agencies. Does Interpol actually investigate anything? Or is it just this information clearing house? That difference means a lot when a French news organization may be mistakenly citing Interpol as "probing" potential corruption.
Ultimately, that distinction turned out to be meaningless. At least, it's meaningless as it concerns Saturday's Newcastle-Arsenal result. As Paul Kelso notes at the Telegraph, Interpol is denying the story on all levels. They have not been notified of a problem. If they did, they wouldn't be the ones investigating. All those activities are handled at the local level.
And so the conspiracy dies less than one day after it was born, though I remain melancholy about the whole affair. There were so many people interested in this story, enough to bring it to the attention of the Telegraph and Yahoo!, yet there the whole thing was razor thin, something anybody with an internet connection and a search engine could have discerned with one query for 'Interpol.' It appears our fascination with the controversial, fantastical, and (in this case) morose is more powerful than our curiosity.
And those must be powerful, powerful forces if we're willing to undermine the magic of a historic comeback, the thrill of that exquisite Cheick Tiote equalizer for the minuscule chance a new urban legend may be true. Perhaps I'm being too romantic, but to me sport has always embraced the unpredictable and absurd as potential fact, If we are no longer willing to welcome our miracles, then sport may have fundamentally changed.
Whether that change is for the better or worse, I don't know. Whether that change has actually happened, I'm even less certain of, but if Newcastle can't miraculously come back against Arsenal without a suspicious rumble from the masses, I need to seriously reevaluate what people want to read about.
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