Half way through Gareth Bale’s run Villa defender Carlos Cuellar had a chance to tackle him. Due to Bale’s superior skill and cumbersome defending he failed to do so and the Welsh wizard went on to show typical poise in making Rafael Van Der Vaart’s excellent match winning goal.
Sky Sports very own Andy Gray, the master of hindsight himself, implored Carlos Cuellar to “foul” Gareth Bale, in his typically sporting manner. Ignoring Gray's advice, Cuellar tried and failed to win the ball. The rest is history.
Rather than opting to scythe down Bale he tried to play within the laws of the game and personally, I would rather he tried to do that than commit an innocuous looking trip, which so often scupper counter attacks which can produce fantastic goals. I’m thinking of a certain goal by Wayne Rooney last season at The Emirates.
So often Gray will pipe up about how it is “a good foul” and “worth a yellow card” when a player is bought down by an opposing player who realises his side is in trouble. It’s cheating but we all know that professional footballers will exploit every opportunity they have to insure their side don’t concede a good goal. God forbid.
What follows usually is the game slowing down, the team who conceded the foul argue with the referee, eventually the offending player gets a yellow card and in the mean time they get eleven men behind the ball. Potential counter-attack over. No exciting end to end football. Snore snore snore.
Typically FIFA take no interest in such apparent minor issues, or any issues other than boosting Sepp Blatter’s ego for that matter, but another sport recently implemented a new law which I feel would go a long way to adding excitement to a game which is constantly slowed down by the sly fouls Gray commends.
Field Hockey, not the kind played in ice skates, introduced the 'Self-pass rule' in 2009 and fouled players are now allowed to pick themselves up and take a free kick instantly to themselves. They don’t have to pass it to a team mate, no waiting for players to get ten yards away. The ball is continuously in play and the game flows much better.
In Rugby Union, players have been able to do this for years and while they don’t always choose to, when they do the game is played at a much higher tempo and is much more exciting for spectators.
There is no farce of having to clear it with the referee or waiting for players to be ten yards away. Remember the stir caused when Thierry Henry used to take a quick free-kick and embarrass a goalkeeper. It’s perfectly within the rules now but a rare occurrence because players need to clear a quick free kick with the referee taking it.
Not the case in Hockey and as a free kick is supposed to be to the advantage of the team taking it, why should it be?
It shouldn’t be a yellow card, if the referee even bothers to give it, and an opportunity for the team committing the foul to recover from a potentially threatening situation.
FIFA are constantly belligerent in their attitude towards goal-line technology, with one of their main grievances being that they feel technology would “slow the game down too much”. At the same time they do nothing about something apparently so minor which constantly slows the game down.
Imagine the excitement if a player like Lionel Messi could just jump up and carry on dribbling the ball when he was hauled down on the edge of the box. How much more end-to-end would games be if every time someone went past Alex Song, John Obi Mikel or Lee Catermole, they didn’t just trip them up and let their side get back into position?
Fans want more goals and FIFA apparently do too. The last World Cup final was boring because of constant fouling which slowed the game down ridiculously. Spain, the best team in the world by far, nearly lost because the flow of the game was constantly interrupted.
If for once FIFA were less archaic and put a little thought into the things which mar the game week in week out, it would become an even more exciting spectacle.
This particular rule change might even be able to save make up the seconds spent checking a goal-line replay.
