I've never seen anything quite like the Gold Cup game Tuesday between French Guiana and Honduras. French Guiana is part of France, despite being on the Caribbean coast of South America. Because of this, it is not a FIFA member and is ineligible for the World Cup. But it is part of CONCACAF and sends a team to CONCACAF events like the Gold Cup.
After losing its opening game of the Gold Cup, French Guiana decided to throw out the rulebook. Against Honduras, the team named 37-year-old Florent Malouda — a former standout in France's Ligue 1 and for Chelsea FC in England — as captain. Malouda is a native of French Guiana, but he played 80 games for France's national team, thus making him ineligible to represent French Guiana in FIFA competition.
The Gold Cup, playing under FIFA rules, informed French Guiana that Malouda was thus ineligible to play in the Gold Cup. French Guiana ignored it. So, as soon as the game kicked off, it was well-known that Honduras would be awarded a 3-0 forfeit win. The teams played a game anyway and finished tied 0-0. Malouda was banned from the rest of the tournament.
This got me thinking about some of the many strange rules in soccer. For example, the rules state that the ball must be properly inflated at all times. If someone kicks it so powerfully that it explodes, the game must be stopped and restarted at the point at which the ball exploded, even if the deflated ball flies into the goal. While it seems impossible in the age of mass-manufactured soccer balls, it happened in a 2004 first-division match in Belgium, and the referee wrongly allowed the goal to stand.
For American fans, though, the soccer rule that's the best known is "you can't use your hands." For some reason, this lack of manual involvement has been a chief anti-soccer point for some commentators; it's even been described as "un-American."
This is patently silly, but it's also wrong, because the truth about soccer is that players use their hands all the time. Each team has a goalkeeper whose specific job is to use his hands. Most of the restarts in any game are throw-ins, in which any player can throw the ball back into play. Some have improved this skill to the point that the throw-in becomes a legitimate attacking weapon.
Saying that you can't use your hands in soccer is like saying that you can't kick the ball in football, even though most football teams employ two specialists devoted to kicking. It's a misapprehension of the rules, and it also doesn't matter.
Soccer doesn't have stranger rules than any other sport; all of them have a few rules that seem immensely strange. Like sometimes, when French Guiana's status as an overseas region of France means that Honduras wins a soccer game by default.