Football has to give blue cards the red card. This incessant tinkering is sporting madness

I’VE not yet got around to reading The Ashley Book of Knots, which is awfully lazy of me because it came out in 1944. But if you want to learn about knots, this book has 3,857 of them. Clifford W Ashley sure knew his stuff, perhaps more than any knotter who ever lived. Though I do wonder if he saw the threat coming from the International Football Association Board.

Those boys and girls within the game’s law-making department love tying a knot even more than he did. Crikey, they might be making a serious run at his turf. So what about a new book, an unauthorised, unapproved biography of their recent work: How Football Tied Itself In Knots And Choked Until It Was Blue.

It’s been almost six years since these guardians of the game wrote VAR into football and a few days since we heard rumblings of a blue card and sin bins. In between they took out their crayons once or twice to amend what constitutes a handball, so they have certainly made themselves known.

But let’s focus on those blue cards, and their brainwave for 10-minute sin bins for dissent and cynical fouls, because that is a proper knot within a knot. That’s a sheepshank within a manger within a bowline. They tied it so tight they are now struggling to get out of it.

What was initially drafted as a sin-bin trial in the professional game has drifted to something less bullish after facing the fury of many in the game. The UEFA president Alexander Ceferin called it ‘the death of football’, which was a little dramatic but it was on the right side of the line at least.

As such, the International Football Association Board (IFAB) will talk it over some more. They’ve put their foot on the ball, if you like, and will instead kick around their thoughts at the AGM next month.

LET’S hope it’s a short conversation and let’s hope, too, this incessant tinkering and tweaking is seen for the exercise in sporting madness that it is. Because what was that old phrase? Football is a simple game — 22 men chase a ball and a bunch of administrators find a way to bugger it all up.

That is what has happened over the past few years and it is the line of misadventure that a blue card would extend. It simply isn’t needed. It wasn’t needed in the 54 years we have had yellow and red cards and it isn’t needed now. Even if IFAB’s heart is in the right place, noting that dissent is a colossal part of football’s refereeing crisis, then its head is in the clouds.

It’s the timing that is particularly baffling. This season has already seen an effort to clamp down on dissent and the referees are holding up their end — the numbers tell us they have given out 153 yellow cards for the offence in the Premier League this season, compared to 87 for the entirety of the 2022-23 campaign. But within those digits has been a trend in a promising direction.

I spoke to the statisticians at Opta this week and they have a breakdown of the figures, naturally. Going month by month, what started as an average of 0.83 cautions for dissent per game in August has tracked downwards — it is now at 0.58 and none of the past three months have been higher than the four that went before. But it is surely too early to abandon the experiment for a change that would disfigure the sport as we know it? More matches of 11 against 10, more teams sitting back and hanging on, more reasons to gripe, more reasons to wonder, ‘why did it have to be like this’?

Which of course has been the upshot of so many of these incursions. The introduction of VAR has been little short of an act of vandalism; a horribly imperfect solution to a game that deluded itself into believing it was too important for mistakes. So important that it tricked itself into a massive blunder.

THAT silence we hear so regularly after a goal is scored, when we wait to learn if it will be permitted by some distant power, might just be the most depressing sound in all of sport. And yet it is only marginally more nauseating than the chatter as we go by frame-by-frame in dissecting the modern meaning of handball. And rest assured, a blue card would build on those discussions.

I’m not so fussed about how it applies to cynical fouls. But a gamechanging minefield awaits around dissent, because that has always been subjective and what a referee is willing to tolerate. It might not sit well with the letter of the lawbook, but it does reflect reality.

We can see the issue that lurks around this corner — if you’re interested, Peter Bankes has overseen 21 Premier League games this season and shown 20 yellows for dissent. Anthony Taylor is second with 13 in 30 games and Chris Kavanagh only nine from 13 matches, which included no caution when Virgil Van Dijk appeared to ask if he had been drinking during Liverpool v Arsenal.

Usually we want referees to apply their own judgment to these situations. But if the penalty is as stiff as going down a man for 10 minutes, with all of the consequences that might bring, it is presumably an area ripe for inconsistencies.

It raises a question: why are the same people who want perfection in all aspects of the game now looking to increase the circumstances where imperfections exist?

What an excellent bit of knotting that would be by IFAB. Clifford W Ashley would be proud.

Better still, he could rise from the grave and tie these jokers to the mast before they commit such a mess to paper.