Modern Football, Danny Murphy, Indiscipline, Diving, and the Offside Rule.

THE OFFSIDE LAW

First of all, I'm not sure that Mark Hughes should be wagging the finger at referees and linesmen about the application of the laws of the game given as he spent a fair part of his career breaking them - class player though he was.

So the offside rule. To me, it makes not a jot of difference that my beloved Spurs had the benefit of Mike Dean's decision on Saturday, the offside rule is a total joke.  Quite why FIFA had to complicate a perfectly good, workable rule that everyone understood  is beyond me.  I accept that it was done to promote attacking football, but clearly the interpretation of the rule is so blurred now that no one really knows what's going on.  There is an art to defending.  Arsenal under George Graham are a perfect example, it helped them to great success in the late 80's and early 90's.  You don't have to be a fan of the type of football - and God knows I'm not - to appreciate that it was effective, and that his team had the discipline and the know-how to do it to great effect.  FIFA go on about how referees should have discretion in their application of the laws of the game. The old offside rule was simple in that a linesman or a referee could use their discretion as to:

a) Whether or not they felt a player was interfering with play by standing in an offside position

Or:

b) Whether or not a player was seeking to gain an advantage by standing in an offside position.

Or:

c) Whether or not a player was just plain offside.

What FIFA have done by talking about phases of play and so on has done nothing other than to confuse fans, players, and officials into having 101 different views, none of which appear to be completely correct.  The Spurs goal on Saturday should not have stood.  The second Everton goal yesterday should not have stood. Both William Gallas and Aiyegbeni Yakubu were standing in offside positions, and I honestly believe that they are equally offside. None of this rubbish that neither of them touched it the ball.  Gallas threw a leg at the ball in the hope he was going to get a touch to it.  Yakubu was standing directly in front of Pepe Reina, blocking his view.  In my view, the way to deal with the issue is to give discretion back to the referees and linesmen.  Go back to applying the offside rule sensibly - if you're offside and hanging a leg out for a ball, or if you're stood in front of the goalkeeper blocking his view, accept that you're offside and get on with it. However, while I disagree with Mike Dean's decision to allow Spurs' second goal on Saturday, I applaud him for having the balls to apply the laws of the game as he saw fit at the time.

DANNY MURPHY's BIG PIE-HOLE

Now, Danny Murphy and his views on dangerous tackles and indiscipline. He really ought to keep his daft mouth shut on matters of discipline.  Particularly when you consider that I for one can remember last season in the Europa League when he got himself sent off for a moment of sheer petulance in the last minute of a tie with Shakhtar Donetsk.  It's all very well, Danny, if you're whiter than white yourself and you come out with these remarks about the behaviour of other teams and their staff. But for someone who currently sits at number 58, with 46 yellow cards, on a list of all 2016 players ever to have been booked in the Premier League, you might want to start weeding your own garden before looking over the fence at those of your fellow professionals.  Enough said about that, really.

MAROUANE CHAMAKH

On to Mr Chamakh and his Tom Daleyesque display of diving so far this season.  Funnily enough, I can see why the referee was conned on Saturday into giving Arsenal their penalty.  Doesn't alter the fact that it was a dive, and diving is cheating.  Mr Chamakh has won 5 penalties this season for Arsenal.  Some teams don't get 5 penalties in a season. I can think of at least 3 of those penalties where the consensus among fans - even those of the team he represents - and pundits alike was that Mr Chamakh had gone down like he had been clobbered by a giant invisible frying pan.  But fair play to him, a 60% cheat-to-conversion-rate isn't bad for a team with a manager who repetitively extols the virtues of fair play.  Which brings me on to my next point.

ARSENE WENGER

I'm not going to sit here and batter Arsene Wenger for the sake of battering him.  After all, a lot of what he says is pure common sense, and to argue with every point of view of someone who has had his success is just ridiculous.  So believe me when I say that I'm not writing this as an Arsene Wenger hater, or just because it makes me feel better as a Spurs fan if I give the Gooners and their manager a bit of stick.  I'm writing this because I hate some of the things Arsene Wenger says.

Mr Wenger:  It simply is not good enough to sit in judgement of the style of football played by everyone else just because it no longer fits in with your idea of how the game 'should' be played - and I'll tell you why.  When you were winning things, it was perfectly acceptable for members of your squad to behave like animals.  It hasn't always been quick passing and silky skills, Arsene

Patrick Vieira - 78 yellow cards, 8 red.

Gilles Grimandi - 23 yellow cards, 3 red.

Martin Keown - 49 yellow cards, 5 red.

Emmanuel Petit - 15 yellow cards, 3 red.

(To name only 4)

Now, we could go into the stats a bit deeper and analyse how many appearances they each made - not that many in the case of Grimandi and Petit - but what'd be the point? None, because the point is already proven.  Anyway, just to drive it home a bit further, and this is the part that makes any rhetoric he comes up with about everyone else completely obscene in my view, Arsene Wenger presides over a club that, in the all time discipline league, sits in 42nd place out of a possible 44 teams.  Worse than Bolton, Wimbledon, Blackburn, Stoke, Leeds, Leicester, Birmingham, Wolves and everyone else apart from Chelsea and Everton. 

I don't entirely disagree with Mr Wenger's view on tackling.  What I will say is that it was fine for Arsenal to behave like the very teams he is so quick to accuse of using thuggish tactics when it was bringing him success and silverware.  It was fine to miss the bad tackles.  It was fine for him to defend Patrick Vieira when he spat in Neil Ruddock's face after having been sent of during a game against West Ham United.  English fans aren't stupid, Arsene, we don't forget these things.  Even recently, and on more than one occasion, he has seen fit to walk from the dugout straight down the tunnel with his nose in the air instead of offering his hand to the manager of the opposition.  All too frequently it appears that he doesn't practice the very things he perpetually harps on about.  Where's the fairness, respect, sportsmanship, grace?  Maybe it's a good thing that he was put in a position on Saturday where he couldn't defend the indefensible.

To make my position completely clear on all of the above, and before I get a whole shitload of Gooners coming down on me like a ton of bricks, I will offer you a summary - and this will be as balanced as everything above.

No one team is whiter than white.  No one player is completely innocent.  I don't believe that players fall into such tight stereotypes as people put them in.  I don't believe that any player goes onto the field of play with a mind to hurt a fellow professional.  I don't believe that Jack Wilshere intentionally went in studs-up on Nikola Zigic on Saturday.  I don't believe that Ryan Shawcross, Karl Henry, or Nigel De Jong deliberately went in to break the legs of Aaron Ramsey, Bobby Zamora, or Hatem Ben Arfa.  The point is that Zigic could have been injured just as badly as a result of a mistimed, ill-judged moment of over-exuberance from one of the finest young players this country has seen for years.  What makes a  mockery of Mr Wenger is that this player happens to be one of his own, and it appears that not even he, the great Arsene Wenger, can keep his own players from making grave errors of judgement.

Tony Pulis, Mick McCarthy, or Sam Allardyce do not have their teams playing a style of football that fills me with joy.  However, I don't have to like it.  Football is a contact sport and should remain that way.  We each have different ideas of how it should and shouldn't be played, but it's not for the purists of this world to tell people like Pulis, McCarthy, and Allardyce that their style is wrong.  

It most certainly is not the place of players and managers who have struggled to maintain their own discipline and that of their teams down the years to be acting like judge and jury on the perceived ill conduct of their fellow professionals.

In all fairness...

I feel terrible for Aaron Ramsey. I really do. A serious injury like he has sustained is a dreadful thing, there can be no argument. But...

And there is a very large but...

I feel dreadful for Ryan Shawcross, too.

When all things are equal, you have to look at the facts in the harsh light of day. There is much wrong with football, and we could harp on about video replays and the offside rule for years. You may think that this is about to be some psychotic anti-Arsenal, anti-Arsene Wenger rant, but read on, for you may be surprised.

Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but I'm afraid I fall on the side of Stoke City manager Tony Pulis when it comes to when and where someone should air them. It's not right that immediately after a game - even if it's a dull 0-0 draw - that a microphone is shoved under a manager's nose. The questions are invasive and designed to get a reaction from managers and players, and that can't be right. We accept that people say and do daft things in the heat of the moment, so would it not be a better idea to allow the heat of the moment to pass before asking a manager what they think about the latest wrong decision or dodgy tackle?

Probably.

But we all know that is what happens. Managers know it. Players know it. And we as punters know it. We love it - it gets us talking. So, on to my points.

I'm going to start with Rafa Benitez, the odd man of Liverpool. It seems to me that after every game he is critical of something. The thing is, he dodges the issue at hand with what he clearly considers to be his charm and wit. I think he brings the game into disrepute by sarcastically not saying very much at all. 'Everything the referee did was fine'. Why say anything at all if you don't mean it? Would he like to be treated like that? To have every move scrutinised and criticised to such an extent that eventually he was unable to do right for doing wrong? He's fortunate in that he has so far managed to maintain support from the terraces, or he'd be out on his ear. History, of course, is firmly in the past. The attitude that there is somehow some God-given right to success because of past achievements is wholly unacceptable, and that's the very attitude he puts across.

The facts at Liverpool are really quite plain. It's entirely down to Rafa Benitez and his clearly not so good management skills that Liverpool are only hanging on to fourth spot by the skin of their teeth. Allowing Xabi Alonso to leave was a disaster. That was a mistake, Rafa, and everyone makes them. Even you.

Now, on to Mr Wenger and what I perceive to be his failings. Wenger's failings are few and far between, but to deny that he doesn't have one huge flaw is just ridiculous. You don't have to necessarily like someone in order to have respect for them. Wenger is Arsenal's most successful manager in the modern era. You have to respect him for his achievements, for the way in which his team plays the game, and for his nouse in the transfer market to some degree. But I find myself rapidly losing respect for him because he sometimes says some patently ridiculous things.

What happened on Saturday to Aaron Ramsey was just bloody awful, and when you witness something like that you have to put your tribalism aside. As I've said, I feel desperately sorry for him. I also feel sorry for Ryan Shawcross. No professional footballer is going to go into a challenge like that with the malicious intent to break someone's leg. We are dealing in split seconds here and I think we'd agree that there was no malicious intent on the part of Ryan Shawcross. His reaction to the incident made it perfectly obvious that he hadn't meant it. Mistimed? Yes. Horrific? Absolutely. Does he deserve to be publicly vilified? Absolutely not.

Serious injury is a part of football. As a Spurs fan I can remember the challenge on Gary Stevens that pretty much ended his career. I can remember John Fashanu's horrendous elbow on Gary Mabbutt. Jan Wouters on Paul Gascoigne at Wembley in 1993. Ben Thatcher on Pedro Mendes not so long back. There are thousands of examples of malice in football, but what happened on Saturday was not one of them.

I do not agree with Arsene Wenger that his players aren't protected enough, and I do believe in coincidence. Arsenal play attractive, top quality football - we'd be utterly daft to deny it. But God knows it hasn't always been that way! I struggle most with Arsene Wenger's habit of publicly slagging off everyone and everything that doesn't conform to his current idea of how the game should be played. For a man who for fourteen years has presided over a team with one of the worst disciplinary records in the Premier League, it is absolutely astounding that he should accuse other players and clubs of kicking his team off the park.

I wholeheartedly stand by this point of view: It is an absolute miracle that, although an immensely talented footballer, Patrick Vieira's behaviour in an Arsenal jersey did not result in him having seriously injured someone. Arsene Wenger would be much more credible had he acknowledged and accepted that. He didn't at the time, and he hasn't since. This is precisely why he is in absolutely no position to take the moral high ground on matters of discipline. Afterall, what's good for the goose?

Wenger carries on about what is and isn't acceptable as if he is The Chosen One in terms of football management. What is unacceptable is that Wenger has consistently defended the indefensible and never offered even mild public criticisism of his own players for their misdemeanours on a football pitch. If you aren't going to do at least that, you have no right to criticise players from other teams, and the constant 'I didn't see it' cop out is not good enough when it's one of your own who is in the wrong.

I can understand why Wenger, Arsenal, and their fans are upset with what happened on Saturday. But just ask yourself this: If one of your boys was half a second late on Shawcross on Saturday, and it was his leg that had been broken in equally horrendous circumstances, would you want your player banned for life? Would you want his reputation being brought into question? Would you want someone with the same clout as Arsene Wenger passing judgement on him?

At least Tony Pulis had the good common sense and decency to come out and give an honest view on the matter, without avoiding the issue by saying he didn't see it.

There are some things that are indefensible on a football pitch. I'm a Spurs fan, but I would never shy away from saying that Paul Gascoigne was a fucking idiot in the 1991 FA Cup Final - footballing genius or not. Moreover, one of the worst tackles I've ever seen on a football pitch was Tottenham full back Mauricio Tarrico's effort against some poor Evertonian a few years back. It's impossible to defend behaviour like that. So why try? But at the same time I accept that accidents happen. Was Luka Modric nobbled deliberately by Lee Bowyer earlier this season? Course not. It was an accident, and accidents happen as often as coincidences.

Everything has to be put into perspective. The managers of our beloved teams are not always right. We'd all do well to make up our own minds instead of standing behind people who have opinions that are so clearly flawed.