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Zidane apologizes, but his family was insulted
Zidane apologizes, but his family was insulted
Zinédine Zidane apologized for his red card but said he had no choice but to react the way he did.--snip from the article--
Since Sunday, lip-readers round the world have been busy trying to decode what Materazzi said, and they had come up with wildly different explanations.
On Wednesday, Zidane refused to specify. He did say, under pressure from the interviewer, that Materazzi used profanity and mentioned Zidane's mother and sister.
"I tried not to listen to him but he repeating them several times," he said in the first of his interviews, on Canal Plus. "Sometimes words are harder than blows. When he said it for the third time, I reacted.
"I am a man before anything else," he said.
Zidane argued that while he accepted that what he did was wrong, the blame lay with Materazzi.
"The reaction must be punished. But if there had been no provocation, there would have been no reaction," he said.
"Do you think that minutes from the end of a World Cup final, minutes from the end of my career, I wanted to do that?" he asked.
"This was not something to do. I want to make it clear because it was watched by two billion people and by millions of kids," Zidane said. "I want to apologize to them. But I can't regret what I did because it would mean that he was right to say what he said."
Materazzi had said that he had insulted Zidane, but denied that he had made remarks about his mother.
"For me, the mother is sacred, you know that," Materazzi said in an interview published Tuesday in Gazzetta dello Sport. Other Italian newspapers reported that Materazzi lost his own mother when he was 14.
Zidane did confirm that the argument had started when he told Materazzi that he if wanted his shirt so much "we could swap at the end of the game."
Zidane also said that Materazzi had not called him a terrorist, one of the early, popular lip-reading theories.
Zidane had said before the World Cup that he would retire after it ended. Asked if he now felt that he had some unfinished business and would reconsider, Zidane said his decision was "definitive." ... "Merci à football," he said as he drew a line under his playing career.
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ReBlogged by ann p on Jul 13, 2006 at 11:24 AM
Posted by ann p on Jul 13, 2006 at 11:24 AM
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