It wouldn’t take ten penalties per game!

By All Blue Daze.

This is the time of year when we can take a break from the football. Find a nice beach and a bit of sun, chill out, and breathe a gentle sigh for a couple of weeks. For others, however, the end of one season is merely the prelude to the next one. There should always be a desire to improve, and that particularly applies to the game’s lawmakers and officials. I’d like to suggest something for their end-of-season agenda.

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At every dangerous set piece these days, odds are there’ll be a celebration of holding, shirt-pulling, pushing, and all sorts of nefarious activities as the ball is played into the penalty area. So, could I propose that we stop, cease and desist with the tolerant attitude that suggests anything short of GBH is acceptable?

The counter-argument to this is that you can’t give ten penalties per game. Well, putting morals aside, why do we not have ten bank robberies every hour? It’s because everybody expects bank robbers to be punished. Shirt-pulling, pushing, etc in football are against the laws of the game, but are unpunished for the most part; the punishments are seldom enforced. Nobody expects them to be. Therefore, no punishment equals no deterrent.

If there was certainty that the laws of the game were going to be enforced, and that the penalty area would no longer be some kind of exclusion zone, one of two things would happen; the all-in wrestling would stop, or referees would give free kicks and penalties as required. Yes, there may be a couple of early games with a few too many spot kicks, but players would quickly cotton on, and the issue would diminish massively, if not disappear completely. Even if some may be slow on the uptake, fear not; conceding penalties will force managers into having a quiet word with their players.

Of course, there would be a problem when our teams or players step away from this regulated scenario, and into European or international matches where other teams are used to less strict – or more accurately, no – application of the laws in such scenarios. Well, I never said this should be confined to the British Isles. Of course, enforcing such a change worldwide would be difficult, but the adoption of the laissez-faire approach seemed to gain global acceptance pretty easily. Who knows, perhaps doing something ‘for the good of the game’ could help FIFA repair its image?

Will it happen? Almost certainly not. It would take someone to see beyond the prosaic ‘what can we do?’ or ‘you can’t have ten penalties per game’ platitudes. I’m not sure such people move in the exalted circles of the controlling bodies of the game. So we’ll just keep tolerating the gradual decline of that element of the game into some sort of version of WWE until the light switch is flicked on.

There are a lot of things that need to be addressed within the game; some are more important than others, and some will take a great deal of time and planning to change. Others are less so, and can be addressed fairly simply. This is one of the latter. There’s no law change required – quite the reverse in fact.

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