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Matthew Vella
The prophet of lateral thinking, Malta-born and St Edward’s educated Edward de Bono, has reaffirmed his status as the Guardian’s favourite crackpot punching bag after he furnished more lateral and ‘out-of-the-box’ wisdom to the sporting world with an idea to award half a point every time a goalkeeper is forced to make a save in a football match.
The inventor of creative thinking was yet again singled out for some satirical treatment by the newspaper’s cricket column, the Spin, which placed its bets on England winning the Australian cricket team now that the aussies have taken de Bono on board with them.
De Bono in fact proposed to the Australian team not to take any wickets, precisely the opposite of the objective of the game. “Why should we not take wickets, you ask? Maybe the batsman’s scoring rate is poor, or we know we can bowl to them in a certain way and not let them score. We know that will complicate the innings for the opposition. It is giving everything a completely different perception.”
It certainly is, the Guardian remarked, images flooding in of Australian cricket players bowling wide as England’s batsmen take it easy on the field.
“But it would be unfair to judge a man on the basis of his views on a single sport,” the newspaper commented. “So here’s de Bono on football: ‘Soccer needs a new lease of life. The scores are too low – it leads to the game being very violent.’”
According to a serious de Bono, half a point should be awarded every time the keeper is forced to make a save, forcing players to shoot at the goal more often, throwing up scores of 19.5 “that will shoot life back into the game.”
Of course, there are limits to gullibility – de Bono is a man who expects civil servants to wear a different coloured hat when talking about hunches (red), advantages (yellow), or simply playing devil’s advocate (black).
Credit to de Bono, unreason and mumbo-jumbo is no alien concept to the Maltese civil service. But having a man whose mental energies would seriously contemplate changing a football’s shape, is possibly the most mental of prospects for the sporting world.
matthew@newsworksltd.com
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