FOOTBALL'S cheat du siècle Thierry Henry says he considered quitting international football in the aftermath of his deliberate double hand ball in extra-time at the Stade de France last week.

These moments of introspection happened last Friday, the same day he also claimed that to have replayed the match would have been "the fairest solution".

But that too was a cynical ploy. Two hours before Henry's carefully prepared statement, which he admits was done with the help of a lawyer, the world governing body Fifa had ruled out the possibility of the match being replayed.

With his dignity disappearing down the plughole, Henry had started to realise that his commercial value was slipping with equal haste.

No surprise then that Henry should step back from his own fanciful brink. Instead of jumping, he paused, and reconsidered.

Hounded by the lynch mob and having cast himself in the role of victim, Henry had been reassured by those who matter most to him – his peers.

On the evidence of the last week, football is a shelter for the ethically impaired. Fellow pros last Thursday morning were queuing up not to condemn Henry for his craven act of sporting fraud but rather the referee and his assistants for failing to spot it.

That's a bit like handing Jack Slipper a 20-year stretch for allowing Ronnie Biggs to slip the net and make off, swag bag in-hand, to Brazil.

"These things happen in football" … "Forget about Thierry Henry" …. "Footballers will do those kind of things" were just three of the inane soundbites trotted out over the airwaves by one of the illuminati of ex pros sharing his experience and expertise in matters of sporting morality.

But, remarkably, this was not the reaction of some dim-witted pundit; those were the views of Ireland assistant-manager Liam Brady.

Rather than condemn Henry for having denied Ireland its place in next year's World Cup, Brady directed his ire at Fifa and their decision to seed the play-offs draw. That, according to the Irishman, had been the true crime.

In Brady's world, had it not been for Sepp Blatter's attempt to stage-manage the play-off process by giving big nations ties against smaller ones and, therefore, the best prospect of qualifying for South Africa, then Ireland wouldn't even have had to play France in the first place.

Indeed, if there was a conspiracy afoot in the northern suburbs of the French capital last Wednesday, Brady would have us believe it was hatched by the world governing body and its match officials.

"You have to ask the officials why they didn't see it (Henry's handball)," Brady confides. "I have a feeling that the pressure on them was so enormous that they chose not to give the foul against Henry."

Brady is not so much lost in the moral maze as unable to find his way into it.

Yet, I suspect, Brady knows exactly what he is doing. The play-offs seeding stuff is a red herring.

Allow me a moment's cynicism. You see, you don't have to delve too deep to figure out just why Mr Brady had side-stepped the prospect of accusing Mr Henry of committing sins most foul.

Consider the footballing map where, in the green corner, there is one Highbury legend and, in the blue corner, another.

Add to that, the fact that Brady's day job is running the Arsenal academy where his boss is Arsene Wenger who, in turn, is a close friend of Thierry Henry and you have it in a nutshell.

So, rather than spending the bitter winter months warming one another up on the heat emitted by smoldering effigies of French footballers, Ireland fans might do better to consider the muddled and occasionally conflicting statements of their assistant-manager.