head on talk sport and bbc link (http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/footbal ... 367588.stm) that Henry addmitted it was hand ball (well he could do no other) but said it was up to the ref to stop the game.

After all the shouting Blatter did about the Eduardo "dive" and cheating in football will anything be done, of course not becasue its a continental European team that just so happens to be the nation of his best mate and boss of UEFA.

i think they should ban henry and the linesman and shoot them both. Its not the refs fault as he wont have been able to see it but the lino should.

if they ban eduardo for cheating then they should ban henry for cheating.

3 game ban starting the day the world cup begins.

Show some balls fifa!!

the ban they give maradona is pathetic, 2 month world ban from football, oh yer nice one, during a period when argentina play one against, against catalonia in a friendly, who arent even a real team!!!

Interesting. He cheated but is it part of the game if the ref misses it?

it was always on the cards there was going to be controversy, especially after they brung the seeded teams idea in!

oh shit! portugal/france/russia may not qualify........quick! seed the teams so they get through!
well done sloveni-akia I say

Allez les Bleus!

Admittedly, it was piss-poor refereeing AGAIN. But do we seriously expect any player these days to 'fess up on the pitch, and have the goal chalked off? With the prize being your country's qualification for the biggest competition in the world?

...et les cochons s'envoleront!

It should never come to that, as the refs and linesmen should pick up on such blatent decisions before that.

Anyone could see by the reaction of shay given that it was handball, you don't need to have a camera around to know someone doesnt go wild that much, if it wasn't hand ball.

maradonna 86 shilton went mad goal stood well done france

oh well that makes it ok then

yes I would, how can Henry sleep at night he has been and won a world cup Ireland always find it hard to qualify and some of them lads playing might never get another chance to play on the games biggest stage.

I think all the seeding and the geographical group things are bollocks anyway, everyone should be drawn into a hat for world cup qualifying and groups picked from there. I understand years ago why people like Brazil had to play chile and australia were in same group as New Zeland due to the transport links, but now you can travel across the world in no time.

Anyone who thinks the world cup will be better with North Korea, Algeria and New Zeland in it rather than Ireland is a window licker in my book.

yep for me it does i was in dublin 86 the irish celebrated that goal as if it was march 17th good enough for them

Bri how can you be happy about cheating in the game and people getting away with it, how many chids will be in the playground today doing that and laughing about it.

Chids?

not happy bout cheating just happy it happened to the irish and by the way im half irish had horrible times in dublin when i was a kid

i wasnt really concentrating what i was writing there as was concentrating on something at work, i think i have invented a word there a mixture of children and kids

i do that all the time, i went to call some dude at work mate and pal the other day and called him pate.

Another favourite of mine is chanks (cheers and thanks)

I walked into one of our University bars when it was 6 mins from the end of extra time. I had thought that France would go through in 90 mins as they had home advantage in Paris in the second leg. I couldn't believe my eyes to see that it was one all on aggregrate. The bar was packed probably with French and Irish students, both men AND women taking an interest as well as neutrals.

Henry could have opened a can of worms there by admitting that he handballed it. I think it might have been wiser to keep his mouth closed.

I couldn't believe it when I saw Russia lost on the away goals rule and Ukraine were so good in our group, but Greece nicked a winner.

I am officially adopting New Zealand as my second team in the World Cup.

On past experience the will do ....nowt.

PoK so it was a night of you really not believing your eyes then, was the calaber on special offer in the bar?

Why the hell would you support NZ

Did you pull kent?

no i didnt he isnt that lucky

Gutted by the result but that life tried to get to the game but it was a sellout.
Good luck England.

I got a cousin from New Zealand who lives in London.

The day he got married, all the family was gathered in the bar of a bed and breakfast in Berkshire watching on Sky Sports the British and Irish Lions being thrashed by the All niggers in Wellington.

*SOUND OF DRUMSTICKS ON CYMBALS*

spot the difference


well ones an argie..

If the ref doesn't see it the ref doesn't see it...

You know how we felt back then now you irish type people...

serves you right for celebrating every time England get beat..

all I can say is HARD LUCK...

From the media attention this is getting, I think is going to become Ireland's "Hand of God" moment.

Why do people have a second team in a world cup, its like having a second team in the league, unless you are from there or like my ex's mam was from (china/south africa) a dad was from Japan, whats the point.

BTW the French 'striker' who represents your beloved TFC is the single worst player ever to get a cap. He had all the heart, battle and technical skill of John Borthwick on a bad day.

Well, there are always lots of women taking an interest at the Vic, Kent.
No known hermaphrodites, tho.

PoK is the Kiwi Lawrence

I was told earlier that Henry did tell the ref it was handball & the ref told him to go away

He admitted it on sky but rightly said it's the refs job to pull it up.

how many irish rejoiced when maradona handled the ball back in the day?

No sympathy for them, it happens, it's happened, move on - you should have took your chances and scored more

I don't see how FIFA can do anything to Henry. If they did then they would surely have to punish every player who deliberately handled the ball ever and that ain't going to happen.

Whether it happened in the last minute of a game that sees qualification for the World Cup or the first minute of Pools vs Wycombe...the crime is still the same.

After the Maradona incident I think the ref was demoted so I wonder if the same will happen here.

RoI are asking FIFA for a replay but there is no chance of that.

I don't think the ref should be demoted for it. When I first saw it I couldn't actually make out what had happened so if the ref had a distorted view it'd have probably been the same for him. There's only one camera angle that makes it obvious that he handled it twice and even that is in slow motion.

The Nelson penalty decision against West Ham was far worse and we didn't bump our gums asking for a replay, we should got on with it and called the ref a kunt. The Irish should do the same.

Brilliran atricle in the guardian on this:http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2009/nov/19/thierry-henry-handball-france-ireland

Cheat or paragon: how Thierry Henry could have handled it all so differently

France captain Thierry Henry had the perfect opportunity to produce an act of genuine sportsmanship. He missed it

Thierry Henry had about five seconds in which to decide to join the immortals. While William Gallas wheeled away from the point-blank header which gave France the lead over the Republic of Ireland during extra time in their World Cup play-off last night, Henry's reaction could have gone one of two ways.

In the act of controlling the ball before providing Gallas with a perfect cross, France's captain had handled it. Not once, but twice. The first time might have been almost inadvertent, a pardonable reflex action as it was about to go out of play. The second, in which he scooped the ball with his left hand, redirecting it to drop nicely on to his right foot, was clearly intentional.

Even there, it could be argued that an element of reflex was involved. But in the few seconds that followed, Henry had two options. He could pretend that he had not broken the most basic law of outfield play. Or he could take the opportunity to neutralise the effect of his reflexes. To erase an error. To right a wrong. To be a man.

The world, or quite a lot of it, was watching. His president was in the seat of honour in the Stade de France. Almost everyone important in French football had assembled to cheer the team on in this vital match. It was the perfect stage for an act of unselfishness, of honesty, of genuine sportsmanship.

Such incidents are not confined to the pages of history. In 1997 Robbie Fowler unsuccessfully pleaded with the referee to rescind the award of a penalty to Liverpool at Highbury after the whistle had been blown for a perceived foul on him by David Seaman. In 2000, while playing for West Ham, Paolo Di Canio stopped play by catching the ball when he saw that the opposition's goalkeeper, Paul Gerrard of Everton, was lying helpless in the penalty area after twisting his knee while clearing the ball. Last March, during a Romanian first division match between Rapid Bucharest and Otelul Galati, Costin Lazar of Rapid refused to take a penalty because he did not believe he had been fouled, and eventually the official agreed with him.

I don't know anything about Costin Lazar, but I do know that Fowler was a streetwise scally and that Di Canio, who once pushed the referee Paul Alcock to the ground after being shown a red card, was in the habit of exchanging Fascist salutes with his hometown supporters at Lazio. Those incidents shifted our perception of them. Some seed of goodness had to lurk within men capable of such essentially unselfish acts. And they are there forever, in black and white, on the public record.

We all know which way Henry decided to go. With a broad, exultant beam on his face, he raced away from the scene of the crime to join Gallas and their team-mates in celebration of a goal that all knew was likely to be decisive in the battle for a place in next summer's World Cup finals.

For this was no ordinary piece of cheating. National pride and tens of millions of euros were at stake. So much greater, then, would have been the admiration of a decision to own up. Instead Henry chose to go down a path which exposed not just his own human frailty but the paranoid fear of failure running through a French squad (and their manager) haunted by comparisons with the glories of the recent past.

Henry was a hopeless captain at Arsenal and he is a hopeless captain of France. On Wednesday he did not have the gumption to say, "OK, that wasn't a goal" – an admission on which the referee would have been obliged to act – "but we'll use the remaining quarter of an hour's play to demonstrate that we are better than the Irish and more deserving of a place in the final 32 in South Africa next year."

And, being Henry, he reacted to the final whistle not by celebrating with his team- mates but by making a show of going over and sitting down on the turf to commiserate with the dejected Richard Dunne, the most heroic of Irish players. He told Dunne that the Irish had deserved to win, and admitted that he had handled the ball. "But," he added, "I am not the referee."

No, mon brave, but you are the captain of France, the country that gave us the World Cup, and here you had the chance to show us what sport can mean – or, at least, what we tell our children it means.

To rank the incident in Paris alongside Diego Maradona's "Hand of God" in 1986 is misleading. That was a street kid's instinct, acclaimed by his compatriots as revenge for Antonio Rattín and the Malvinas. Henry may come from Les Ulis, a quartier difficile outside Paris, but he is a sophisticated man, and a much decorated one. A chevalier of the Legion d'Honneur should have done better – by his opponents, by himself, and by the game.

Any African Americans in there?? We had one in this neck of the woods over the last few days banging his gums about internet freedom and human rights. He went home with his arse in a sling after they gently reminded him that his own country produces 92% of the pornographic content of the internet and they still execute children and the mentally ill.

the simple version of this comment is:

"everyone was interested in the footy".

Why did you walk in with 5 minutes left?

He was going for a fashionably late entrance.

I've noticed the normally 'rent a quote' Sepp Blatter and Michel Platini have been a bit quiet on this one.

Where are they from again?

Scratch that I've just checked and Blatter is Swiss.

He's still a 'lovely lovely person' though

oh if it was us, and rooney or defoe or anyone like that had handballed it, blatter would be creaming in his pants at the thought of this game being replayed.

I love how it's the refs 'fault'... who did the dirty deed again. please remind me. It's like the Yorkshire Ripper blaming the police because they didn't catch him to stop him murdering.......

looking at the ref's position it was almost impossible for him to spot it.

Should the game be replayed? No.

Should there be video technology introduced? maybe

Should Fifa come down hard on cheats and re-introduce honour back into the game? in my opinion yes

Will anything happen? Will it shite, Fifa will just bury their head in the sand yet again.

This decision has basically decided who has went to the world cup or not, when decisions like this are being decided on controversial decisions, then i think yes, tv technology should be introduced.

If it slows the game up, then so be it.

The trialled it at some under 17 game a few years ago, i think it was that ref that sent beckham off who was reffing it, him checking with a 4th official who has a tv monitor only added 30 seconds onto the game, for the sake of 30 seconds i think we can handle tv technology.

What Henry did was no more than a bookable offfence, people have been doing sly handballs to gain an advantage since the game began. Some of the stuff people have been saying about Henry today is total bollocks, he's not a cheat he did something in the spare of the moment which the officials failed to spot, part of the game get over it!!

I remember the first England game I ever went to, England V Brazil at Wembley in 1990, the Brazilian forward went round Chris Woods and shot only for Stuart Pearce to make a diving save. The ref gave a corner England won 1-0!!

fifa's excuse with that scenario though is any changes should be available throughout the game, top to bottom. How are Northern league or even Blue Square North teams going to be able to do the same thing?

there will need to be at least 2 cameras for each box, and someone with the technology available to view it instantaneously at every match in every professional and semi professional league in the world. I can't see it happening!