Thierry Henry Is A Cheat But We Can't Hate Him For It

Henry admitted he handled it, but fudged whether he had done it deliberately. Television replays clearly showed the ball did not just hit his arm, he used his hand to control it.

It was a blatant infringement and Ireland have every right to feel aggrieved about it. In fact, aggrieved probably doesn't do their emotions justice. Furious would probably be better word.

However, it raises interesting questions about morality in sport. Henry should have owned up if he didn't want to cheat. He said he would have if the referee had asked him, but he didn't, so he didn't own up.

That's a bit like saying I would have owned up to murdering that bloke on Saturday night but the police never asked me so I just kept quiet. You can't shift guilt in this way in the real world so you shouldn't be able to get away with it in football, but perhaps I'm being naive.

Ask yourself this. If an English player, for argument's sake, Wayne Rooney, did something similar and England qualified for the World Cup as a result, would you have been happy if, in extra time in a tension filled game at Wembley, he said, "no hang on a minute ref, I handled that ball before setting up the goal so it shouldn't stand?"

I doubt you would, even if, in hindsight you would feel as though we had won a moral victory. And whose to say England wouldn't get another chance and win anyway. Then again, the problem with moral victories is they don't bring in millions of pounds and they don't win trophies.

What if the match went to penalties and England lost, again?! It would be lovely to think we would all congratulate Rooney on his moral fibre, and we probably would in the long run, but at the time we would shout and scream at him for being so honest when the world around us seems so dishonest and cruel.

I doubt any English player would have behaved any differently to Henry, as distasteful as that is. They might have done it if was just a normal qualifier or a meaningless friendly in Qatar, but in a match that meant so much..... what about a World Cup quarter final, a semi-final, or even a final?

Can we really blame Maradona for cheating. He got away with it, so did Michael Owen when he dived against Argentina in the World Cup in 1998. Perhaps not as bad as a blatant handball, but still cheating at the end of the day.

We English (and Irish) have a proud sense of fair play and it upsets us when we are cheated out of something, of course it does.

It is easy to hate Henry and call him all sorts of names, but France will be at the World Cup next summer and Ireland won't because Henry made a split-second decision and then kept his mouth shut about it.

Would you, if miraculously put into his shoes, have done anything differently? You might have regretted it afterwards, but I suspect few French supporters will. As ever, the only people who really suffer are the victims of foul play, the victors just say sorry - at least some of them do - and get on with it.

Henry will be not punished by the French Federation and he will not be punished by Uefa or Fifa for what he did, just as Maradona was never banned for his handball. Until that changes, these types of things will continue.

Henry will go to the World Cup where France will be seen as one of the teams capable of winning the tournament, he will not be punished, not in this life at least...