By JEFFREY MARCUS
JOHANNESBURG — When it comes to selecting just the right swear word to hurl at a referee, Wayne Rooney is a walking thesaurus. In exchanges with officials, he mixes and matches with such flourish, he might be confused for Roget’s bawdy cousin.
But if Rooney, a striker for England, lets fly a similar tirade on Saturday in his team’s first World Cup game, against the United States in Rustenberg, it is likely to be his farewell speech.
George Carlin had his seven dirty words, and FIFA, soccer’s international governing body, has its seven offenses. Any one of them will get a player immediately ejected from a game. Rooney might do well to read up on No. 6: “Using offensive, insulting or abusive language and/or gestures.”
On Saturday, the job of enforcing these rules for the match between England and the United States will fall to a squad of Brazilian referees who will need to keep their ears pricked for words they might not have learned in school. “We have to learn what kind of words the players say,” Altemir Hausmann, a referee’s assistant, told Globo TV Sports in Brazil. “All players swear and we know we will hear a few.”
The last time Rooney dropped a crude phrase on a referee was in a World Cup warm-up match against a South African team. It earned him a public rebuke from the amateur official after the game.
“He is a good player when you see him on the TV, but when you see him on the pitch, he just keeps on insulting the referees,” said Jeff Selogilwe, who officiated England’s game against the Platinum Stars on Saturday. “I was very disappointed in Rooney because he is my favorite player.”
“Actually, he is still my favorite player,” Selogilwe confessed to The Sun. “He apologized to me and gave me the shirt he was wearing.”
England’s captain, Steven Gerrard, said he had no problem with a ban on swear words. “You just don’t swear at the ref, simple as that,” he said Thursday. “In this day you have to show the referee respect.”
Gerrard said he hoped Rooney could keep his mouth in check. “It’s difficult enough playing” 11 versus 11, Gerrard said. “If we go a man down, it’s just going to make it even tougher for us.”
In the quarterfinal against Portugal in the 2006 World Cup, Rooney was given a red card for stamping on an opponent’s crotch, and his undermanned team was ousted from the tournament. It was the second time in three World Cups that England had a player ejected in the game in which the team was eliminated.
“He always plays on the edge, but Wayne has to control his emotions and take it out on opposition teams rather than referees,” Gerrard said.
Alex Stone, a FIFA spokesman, acknowledged that with at least 17 languages spoken by the 32 teams in the World Cup, it is impossible for referees to understand all of them.
“It’s not the words, it’s what they’re doing,” he said. “It’s what they’re saying or how they’re behaving.”
Civility and aggressive vulgarity are universally understood.
United States goalkeeper Tim Howard said that emotions would run high on both teams Saturday and that the Americans were told to keep their language rated PG.
“I’m sure we’re going to try to the best of our ability to do that,” he said. “I don’t think it will go 100 percent as planned.”
Howard said any outburst would most likely be a result of frustration, not any disrespect for opponents or the officials.
“Refereeing is an impossible job,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/11/sports/soccer/11cursing.html?src=twt&twt=nytimes
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