2014 edition of managers’ verbal gymnastics and theatrics by the players
WHEN a player dives he is in “a moment of contradiction”, but when a referee refuses to award a penalty it is “scandalous”.
The first phrase belongs to Jose Mourinho, the second to David Moyes. Both were voiced on another tin-hat day for match officials: New Year’s Day, that notional dawn of fresh starts, when the all-too-familiar breaks back in and taunts us.
First, the mitigation. Moyes was surely right to say that Ashley Young should have been granted a penalty when Hugo Lloris, the Tottenham goalkeeper, came sliding across his penalty area with one leg raised at axe-man height, and crashed through the Manchester United winger moments after he had crossed the ball.
At Southampton, meanwhile, Mourinho made no attempt to hide the fact that Oscar had dragged his foot across the turf in order to make contact with the Southampton goalkeeper and therefore caused his own tumble. How could Mourinho defend young Oscar, given that Chelsea’s manager has been extolling the English hatred of simulation all season, and when his own player had confessed to attempting to deceive Martin Atkinson?
Football wasted no time in stamping 2014 with the ethical hallmark of 2013, 2012 and so on back when the fundamental problem in penalty boxes was the same dishonesty of some players, and the refusal or inability of managers to eradicate the Tom Daley impressions.
Howard Webb, once smeared with accusations of bias in favour of United, is now the enemy under the bed at Old Trafford, where Moyes said: “If that isn’t given a penalty, I don’t think we will get any more in the league this season. It is reckless, it is late, it is in the penalty box. It was scandalous.” It was certainly a miscalculation by Webb.
There are no Opta stats for karma, but it would be fair to say Young is low on the list of players to whom referees would feel reflexive sympathy in the situation generated by Lloris. That is not to say that Webb thought: “If Ashley Young is the victim, a foul doesn’t count.” But subconsciously the referee might presuppose a degree of theatricality when contact is made, especially when a recidivist diver has previously tried to wriggle off the hook.
And Young was certainly wriggling when he spoke to the press in an apparent attempt to repair his reputation, only to make things worse. This was the interview in which he said of diving generally: “The referees are giving decisions and that is where I think it lies. I think it’s one to ask the referees – they’re the ones who are giving free-kicks and penalties.”
In other words, if a player dives it is the fault of the referee when the dive is not spotted or punished. This warped and dangerous logic will not have endeared Young to match officials, who are now routinely clamped in the village stocks after games for “errors”, while players and managers mostly escape such scrutiny for the dozens of mistakes they might make collectively.
Oscar’s case was more sinister. Tilting like a Pendolino train even before contact was made with Southampton’s keeper, Chelsea’s third scorer in a 3-0 win was effectively seeking not only a penalty but the sending-off of Kelvin Davis for the denial of a clear goalscoring opportunity.
“I don’t like it,” Mourinho said. Good. “But his explanation to me I also accept.” You can feel the cop-out coming: “Oscar found himself in a moment of contradiction,” his manager continued. “And we are speaking about fractions of a second – where he thinks ‘contact, penalty, red card’, and there was certainly no contact. Oscar is a clean player who was waiting for the goalkeeper to come and smash him because that’s what normally happens in those situations.”
Excuse me? The player starts falling over and kicks a prone goalkeeper to help himself fall over as a kind of pre-emptive anti-crime measure? Well, in many cases skilful players do have to take evasive action against violent challenges.
But this one fitted none of those criteria. Instead a goalkeeper lay on the ground while his arms were outstretched. No one was about to be “smashed”.
Verbal gymnast that he is, Mourinho found a way to exonerate Oscar (“a clean player”) without contesting the yellow card itself. Back in Manchester, Moyes was able to defend Adnan Januzaj after his third caution of the season for diving without quite causing us to forget that here is a gifted young footballer who has joined the senior ranks believing that conning referees is part and parcel of his trade.
There is your “moment of contradiction”: the trouble divers bring on themselves.