David Preece: Don’t take physicality out of our football!
The original opening line to this week’s piece was going to be “Excessive Force? It sounds like a Steven Seagal film that went straight to DVD in the 90s”.
A quick Google later reveals it actually WAS an action movie released in 1993, not starring Seagal though, but the voice of Darth Vader and King Jaffe Joffa in ‘Coming To America’, James Earl Jones.
It was panned by the critics at the time. Of course it was. It’s ‘Excessive Force” and not a patch on “No Retreat, No Surrender”.
A film four times as good - if box office takings are to go by - and by my reckoning, the first major role of one Jean Claude Van Damme, who plays the Russian antagonist of our hero, Jason Stilwell.
Most of this is irrelevant, of course, but it seemed a great opening that would go somewhere other than down this metaphorical cul-de-sac.
Not that the terrible film of the 90s made too many column inches back then, nor is it deserving any now except for the most tenuous of links ... as excessive force has been big news this past week.
Jamie Vardy saw red for the amount of force he used in making sure he won his duel for the ball with Wolves’ Matt Doherty and most people seemed to agree that in the eyes of the law the decision was correct but how exactly do you go about measuring the amount of force that would be deemed excessive?
The laws state that: “Using excessive force is when a player exceeds the necessary use of force and endangers the safety of an opponent and must be sent off ”.
Yet if this was the case, we’d end up playing five-aside every week.
When a goalkeeper flies over the heads of the players below to fist away the ball and in doing so clattering everyone, isn’t he using excessive force?
Or is that classed as necessary force?
Given the risk of head injuries in such situations, isn’t that kind of scenario a bigger danger to players’ welfare?
It’s not that I’m advocating a modern day version of the brutal ancient sport of Calcio Florentino, but at its base there’s a gladiatorial aspect to contact sport that we shouldn’t be so keen to drive out.
The game has moved beyond the neolithic physicality that dominated the game for decades and arrived at a point when “excessive force” in relative terms, is nothing of the sort.
Still, if you listen to Gary Neville talk of the dominant sides of his own Manchester United, Arsenal and Chelsea of the recent past, physicality was one of their common threads running through them.
Room should still be left for will to win the ball and a dominating desire to still mean something.
Two players vying for a 50/50 ball and neither giving the other an ounce of advantage should still be an admirable trait.
And where has the problem of the trailing leg of a tackler catching a player after the ball has been won come from?
There was a tackle in Sunday’s game between Manchester City and Huddersfield Town where Terence Kongolo slid across to put the ball out of play as Bernardo Silva sprinted down the wing and as he cleanly took the ball, everything else (his trailing leg and the rest of his body) took out Silva and there was uproar on commentary.
In the wake of Vardy’s red, this was deemed the same by some, which just left me thinking: “What else is he supposed to do? Somehow detach his leg from his body as he’s about to lunge in?”.
You simply cannot intercept the ball in situations like that without the extra contact.
It was the same with the clearance by Jordan Pickford that led to him coming in to contact with Danny Ings and caused Southampton manager Mark Hughes to fume.
Yes, the same Mark Hughes who was built like an ox and regularly used every bit of his physique to bully centre-halves in to submission.
Pickford had to adjust and swing his leg high to clear the ball. Ings could see this and ran to block the ball, turning his back and jumping at the Everton keeper as he kicked the ball.
What did Ings and his manager expect to happen? He knew he was putting himself at risk of getting kicked with the followthrough so why complain when it does happen?
And just for one second, let us suppose that Pickford, Kongolo and Vardy did mean to make contact with their opponents.
So what? This is professional sport, not ballroom dancing.
Do they want to get a mental advantage by being more dominant? Definitely. Do they want to physically hurt their opponent? Yes. Yes they do. Not seriously of course, but just enough to leave its mark, not to cause long-term damage.
This is a truth that is never spoken but wouldn’t be denied behind closed doors.
If you tackle someone and it either makes them think twice about the next confrontation or injures them just enough so they have to be substituted, but not enough for them to miss the next game, that’s the ideal scenario.
The phrase “to leave something on them” gets mocked quite a bit but anyone who has played competitively with something at stake will be familiar with it and although you are trying to gain some kind of advantage, this isn’t the “dark arts” as some people call it. It’s competition. That’s why managers across the board from the top to the bottom still talk about desire and heart when they speak because ultimately it’s that drive that pushes you that bit further.
Yes, desire and fight have been overemphasised in our game at the cost of the finer, more intelligent points, but it’s not to be mocked.
It’s what got all of those players on your TV where they are now!
It’s what took them beyond you and your school team. Beyond those 99.9% of other aspiring footballers who fell by the wayside.
All the precautions have been made to make football as safe as it has ever been, so let’s not go too far with the cotton wool.
So please, don’t try to take all the physical contact away from the game because here’s another thing about football you won’t hear people say - I actually quite liked getting kicked.