Watching the Sepp Blatter news conference yesterday, I was struck by a strange sense of deja vu. I had seen this scene played out somewhere before in the dim and distant past. A man of authority stood before an angry crowd who were demanding answers. A man who forgot that with authority comes responsibility. A man who did not have the backbone to meet that responsibility and decided to take the path of least resistance. "This has nothing to do with me."
Who was this man? Where had I seen him before? Then it struck me. This was Pontius Pilate, the fifth Prefect of the Roman province of Judaea from 26–36 AD. As I am neither two thousand years old, nor the owner of a particularly good memory, it was not the original events that I was taken back to, but rather Franco Zeffirelli's epic film from the late 1970s.
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