There is no such thing as football any more. Sure, we have the Premiership and Football League back in full flow, with all their reassuringly familiar teams playing each other in reassuringly familiar ways. But there’s one glaring problem: the game they are currently being forced to play for the 2020-21 season isn’t football.
It may resemble football, but if you look closely at it, you’ll just be able to discern that in reality, it is a completely different game masquerading as football. Just like the popular early-90s football game Sensible Soccer.
The problem, of course, is the glaringly egregious new handball law, being enforced with Stasi-like efficiency and sadistic enthusiasm by the hapless operators of the pernicious VAR system. Now that we have VAR, it seems, there has to be at least one completely, obviously and blatantly wrong new law for it to enforce each season — last season saw the offside law VARed into a state of high farce.
Over the weekend of 26/27 September, two Premiership games were turned into travesties by the ridiculousness of the new rule – and of its implementation. VAR handed one unjustifiable point to Newcastle United and two to Everton, after preposterous decisions to award penalties to those teams for what in previous years would have rightly been dismissed as ball-to-hand incidents in which the respective defenders were physically unable to get their arms out of the way.
Crystal Palace manager Roy Hodgson – bless him – whose side saw a 1-1 draw turned into a 2-1 loss, pointed out, quite rightly, that if the rule was to stand, the game would cease to be about scoring goals and would instead be about attackers deliberately kicking or heading the ball against defenders’ arms. Remove the concept of ball to hand, and football becomes something other than football.
At which point, real-life Premiership football begins to resemble the 1992 version of Sensible Soccer for the SNES.
Don’t get me wrong: that original console version of Sensible Soccer is one of my favourite ever games. I was pretty much obsessed with it in the early 90s, and played it obsessively against my then-flatmates. It was fun and addictive, but it wasn’t football – due to a design flaw ironed out in later versions.
In that version of Sensi, each team had a couple of starred players with mega-stats, and if you wriggled one of those into a tiny corridor out by the touchline and just inside your opponent’s half, you could launch an unstoppable shot at a 45-degree angle into the far corner of the net, no matter which keeper you faced. Thus games of Sensi came to resemble a form of ball-chess, with you trying to hit that sweet-spot and your opponent trying to stop you from doing so, or vice-versa, and everything else that happened on the pitch rendered irrelevant.
That could be great fun, and still required plenty of skill, but it simply wasn’t football. Nor is a game in which attackers can deliberately kick the ball into defenders’ arms in order to win penalties.
The fuckwits who laid down the new law, at least, can now change it since on Sunday 27 September, Tottenham Hotspur, the team I support, fell foul of it against Newcastle United. Newcastle’s first shot of the game was the penalty that resulted from the bullshit award by VAR after Andy Carroll had headed the ball into Eric Dier’s arm from about a foot away.
Even Newcastle’s manager, Steve Bruce – who we’ve always known to be an honest and honourable man – described the penalty award which robbed Tottenham of two points as: “Nonsense. If you’re going to tell me that is handball, we may as well pack it in.” And his side had profited from the decision beyond their wildest dreams.
Now that Spurs have fallen foul of a preposterous, clearly wrong-headed and ill-thought-out (if, indeed, any thought was ever put into it, which is unlikely given the Tory government-style lack of talent or intelligence apparently possessed by football’s authorities) we can at least now change it.
Spurs are the eternal canaries, forever condemned to fall foul of whatever egregiousness is allowed to seep into football, so that the likes Of Man City, Man United, Liverpool and Chelsea, perennially protected from being on the wrong side of dubious decisions, can be insulated from the slings and arrows of outrageous rule-making.
Cast your mind back, for example, to the end of the 2011/2012 Premier League season, when Tottenham became the first and only team to finish fourth yet be denied a Champions League berth, because Chelsea had won the Champions League. That rule, naturally, was changed the following season and if the same scenario played out now, whichever team finished fourth would, of course, be entered into next season’s Champions League.
All that remains now is for whoever ruined the handball rule to change it back, before the whole of football descends further into farce. A U-turn of Johnsonian proportions will be required for that, which is curiously appropriate, since football’s governance, by the likes of FIFA, UEFA and the FA, mirrors that of Johnson and his cronies.
Yes, I know that in this case, the body which needs to sort out the mess it created is IFAB. Which is basically FIFA’s human shield for lawmaking – it’s based in Zurich (presumably at FIFA HQ) and exists only so that FIFA can blame someone else for mangling the laws of a once-great game. Nice to see FIFA stealing a tried and tested ploy from the playbook of right-wing governments. Like this country, football is in the grip of a plutocracy which appears to care only about where the next bung or freebie wristwatch comes from, and is incapable of grasping minor details, such as preposterous rule-changes that have the capacity to reduce the entire sport to a joke. Sure, nobody voted for football’s authorities, but how did sports, countries or indeed anything manage to fall into the hands of such venal incompetents? How did we let them? Football’s latest descent into farce serves merely to highlight the way in which the world is sleepwalking into fascism.
