Why has the game that I love gone so wrong?

wolvestyke · Apr 7, 2014

The Man City penalty

I did mean the Man City penalty Farnham - but to be honest it happens most weeks. Strikers ability to hang a leg out so that it catches the defenders leg and gives them 'the right' to go down seems to be a vital 'skill' to have nowadays.....

BorderTerrier · Apr 7, 2014

Red Rain said: ↑

Sorry, this is once again very long. I will quite understand if those with short attention spans decide they do not wish to read on.

On Saturday, I watched a very average Brighton side take the game that I used to love, and set it in a modern context of diving, play acting and cheating. I saw a referee who knew exactly what was going on, but who refused to put an end to it because he knew that the assessor, who was watching from the stand, would not stand by him if he chose to stamp it out. Frankly the whole scene that I witnessed was distasteful, but what distressed me more was that when Dawson won a foul because he lowered his usual honest standards, he won applause from the lower tier of the East Stand. It meant that even though the home support recognised the fault in Brighton and were only too happy to berate them for it, they were only too willing to encourage the same from their players if it meant that we would win an edge.

I remember the sport when it was violent, when it was played by thugs who tried to take the players with skill out of the game. Some managers encouraged the violence in the players they controlled and actually coached it. They were allowed to get away with it because the referees let them and the supporters wanted to see a high level of physical contact in the British game. It was symptomatic of the violence off the field, both inside grounds and on the way to and from grounds. You knew when you turned up on a Saturday that there would be a black hat, a “baddy”, who you could boo for the violence of his tackling and his utter disregard for the rules of the game, and you knew there would be a white hat, a “goody”, usually clad in red and white who would put everything right by scoring a winner. It was pure theatre and it was great, but it had to end.

In Europe and the rest of the world, a different game had developed. A game without physical contact which was played at a lower tempo, a game where skill was allowed to flourish. It was a game in which ball retention was all important, even if that meant that the ball went backwards away from goal in order to do so. When British football came into contact with this foreign game, the British way of exchanging possession at regular intervals and getting the ball forward quickly in order to create more penalty area action was defeated as much by the failure of the British football philosophy, as it was through the application of standardised world codes of refereeing which penalised of the more robust British style. We had invented and codified the game, but the world had told the British that our version of the game was too violent. If we wanted to continue to play on the world stage, our game had to change. Our game had become too violent, and in many ways, the world was right.

Not that the changes in the application of the rules have extended everywhere. I still hear the regulars at Oakwell as they castigate our back four for playing tippy-tappy football as the try to retain possession of the ball. I still hear them turn on Kennedy as he fails to take every opportunity to hit the ball aimlessly down the channel that no longer exists to a centre forward who would be better employed if he stopped wandering down the wings and remained central. I still see the lack of patience that results in long, aimless head high balls being hit towards forwards who have little hope of controlling the ball and building any serious attacking intent. I still see no indication that the majority of the crowd have realised that the days when effort was any substitution for pace and skill have long gone as they continue to yell from behind me “get stuck in” and other expressions from days gone by that hark back to simpler and in many ways better times, when Sepp Blatter had never been heard of and Sir Stanley Rous ruled the footballing waves.

But the home crowd is right to ask if this new brand of sanitised sport is not an over-reaction to the excesses of the past. If the game has not gone too far in protecting those with pace and skill from the Neanderthals who formerly exploited the British public's love for physical contact and if the game has not gone too far and is now being exploited by those who are seeking to exploit the rules through play acting and cheating. Just as before, the rule makers and administrators are complicit in the ruination of the game because they dictate to the men in black (or men in purple as they were on Saturday) exactly how the game is officiated. The referees are closer to the action and they know what is going on. They know that they are being conned. But they also know that unless they officiate the game according to the currently applied standardised view, they will not be officiating for very long. The crowd bellows at a referee who they see as incompetent and complains about the general standards of refereeing but does not make the connection as to why this situation has come about.

I find myself falling out of love with the game, a game that I have love for most of my 63 years. There is much wrong with the structure of the game as a result of the imbalance that was created by the Sky TV money coming into it, an imbalance that is particularly prevalent in the Championship. It is not helped that my club has become a victim of this imbalance. However, the cynical way in which Brighton exposed the worldwide problem of endemic on field cheating has left a bitter taste in my mouth. If anyone wants to look at an example of how that cynicism is ruining the game as a spectacle and as an entertainment, then they only had to be at Oakwell on Saturday. There used to be an expression that cheats never beat. Well the cheats got a point on Saturday and the sending off of Etuhu very nearly gave them the ultimate reward for their actions. Once again the game needs to clean up its act if it is not to lose its appeal to the paying public.
Click to expand...

“Any change, even a change for the better, is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts”
Arnold Bennett

Woodbine · Apr 7, 2014

Re: The Man City penalty

Cheats have been prospering in football for many years and the authorities do nothing about it whatsoever. Any kind of change must come from the top and be filtered down, but FIFA is corrupt and sadly it seems so is The Football League in this country...

The media are dreadful in this country too and have been advocating cheating as good play for years. John Motson has been using the line, 'There was contact, so he was entitled to go down' for quite a while. Many aspects of the game really annoy me, to the point where I have largely lost my passion for football...

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