Saturday 12 May 2012

Chaos, Confusion and Corruption in the Romanian League

A very interesting incident happened on the 31st matchday of the Romanian Liga I. (There are 34 matchdays in this league, by the way.)

CFR Cluj, the leaders (by three points, at that time), were playing Universitatea Cluj, their local rivals, on the stadium of Universitatea.
Now, there should be no surprise that football teams from the same city, in Europe, generally hate each other. Because CFR won two league championships recently, in 2007-2008 and 2009-2010, after being promoted in the early 2000s, on top of being a local rival, while U. Cluj hasn't won any title, ever (despite being in the first league for way longer), and probably never will, the Universitatea radical fans have a deep, criminal hatred of anything CFR.

So, 25 minutes into the match, CFR gets a penalty, transformed into a goal by Cadu, a Portuguese defender. Cadu has the bad, for him, and for the match, idea to go and celebrate in front of the most fervent Universitatea supporters. He goes and does a little cheering right behind the U. Cluj goal, under a torrent of objects raining down from the stands.
The Universitatea goalkeeper, Bornescu, a big guy, significantly bigger than Cadu, sees what the Portuguese is doing, after scoring on him, and goes berserk.
So, he runs after Cadu, and starts beating him up.
After a while, some players hold him aside, while he keeps shouting he wants to kill Cadu, and that he'll beat him up later.


The referee, Alexandru Tudor, gives red to both players, and stops the match.

As the players go in the tunnels, a few more people, including somebody clearly from Universitatea's technical team (who would later be fired), again brutally attack Cadu, hitting him even from behind.
On that day, Cadu ended up in the hospital, and the entire CFR Cluj team had to be evacuated in the gendarmerie van.

This happens on Tuesday, May 8. The decision as to what would happen with this match belongs to a specialized football commission, which is to get together on Friday (yesterday) and decide.

A big confusion then ensues, as to what official decision could be made to fix the conundrum.
The rules in the Romanian league apparently can be interpreted in many ways, because here are four realistic options, all supposedly legitimate decisions that this body could take regarding the match. (And yes, the referee had decided that he wanted no more part of the match, on that night.)
1) CFR Cluj wins 3-0, because the way in which Universitatea organized the match put them in danger.
2) The game is played to the end, on another day, from minute 27 and 1-0 for CFR, which perhaps to a mild-mannered spectator seems like the most reasonable decision. (That is, if Universitatea Cluj should not be held accountable for the criminal attacks against Cadu.)
3) The game is played on another day, from 0-0, an option which seems really weird, but just wait and see why it was included.
4) Both teams lose by the score of 0-3, if it is determined that both teams broke the rules of the game.

But there are other factors here. There are powerful people who do not want CFR to win the title.
Four other teams, FC Vaslui, Steaua Bucharest, Rapid Bucharest and Dinamo Bucharest, are trailing CFR, with some chances at the title.

For decades, before the mid-2000s, the second and fourth teams mentioned above manipulated the Romanian league like their own pockets. This goes back into the Romanian communism days, as a matter of fact, to when one team was the army team, and the other was the police team.

Dinamo and steaua are supposed to be bitter rivals. But here's a picture of Steaua's owner, Gigi Becali, some kind of gangster who dreams of ruling the country and openly says he'll pay smaller teams that face his team's direct opponents (to take points away from said opponents, thus helping his team), and Dinamo's chief, Cristi Borcea, on the left, a guy who talks a lot but doesn't do enough, a published picture which surely does not help to support the theory that the two teams hate each other. (These guys should not go too close to each other, am I not right? Do you see Alex Ferguson putting his arm around, and posing for a nice picture with, Roman Abramovich, for example? What the hell?)


Anyway, these characters may just help each other to see that CFR loses as much ground as possible in the last matchdays. And surely they still have some connections inside these official federations commissions, certain relations stemming from the days when they were winning everything big.

So, what is the decision of this damn commission, already, you may ask?

Well, this well-oiled, know-it-all commission ends up deciding that referee Tudor should not have stopped the match, that the Universitatea goalkeeper and the CFR goalscorer are both equally guilty (because they both get suspended 2 matches), and that the game should be replayed from 0-0, before the end of the season. (And this would mean CFR would have to play 4 games in 9 days, including two major derbys.)

However, there are games scheduled every day, until May 19, with the exception of Friday, the 18th. But that's just 24 hours before CFR is supposed to play Steaua, at home, on the last matchday, a game which could decide the title.
So, the games (most of them, at least) of the final matchday are then postponed to Sunday, and the decision comes that U - CFR will, indeed, be played again on Friday, the 18th.

Naturally, the CFR organization feels that they were horribly wronged here, and they will appeal as far as the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne.
After all, why shouldn't they? In any other league, there is little doubt that CFR would win the match, 3-0, based on what Universitatea, as the organizing club, permitted to happen. But this is Romania, where corruption still has deep roots, despite a few fairly honest seasons lately in Liga I.

However, the thing is, is there time to make these appeals before the replay? (That's in 5 days.) Or before the end of the championship (in 7-8 days)? And, if not, and the game is already played, will the Court of Arbitration mess with the internal organization of the Romanian league after the official closure of its 2011-2012 season?
(About 10 years ago, Rapid threatened to do that, in order to get the title away from steaua, but nothing materialized. If CFR loses this title, courtesy of what happens in the new game at Universitatea, can they get it back at Lausanne?...)

You could not see a scandal like this in any other league in the world, folks!

Only in Romania!...

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