I love a crunching tackle. There’s something inherently satisfying upon the moment a player throws himself to the ground, reaches the ball and legally tumbles his opponent. It’s a moment of pure athleticism, competition and sport. A love-letter to the beauty of defending.
And yet we continue to discuss the viability of the ‘tackle’ in modern football. Following Vincent Kompany’s red card in the Manchester Derby a couple of weeks ago, commentators and pundits have been on high alert. Currently, whenever the usually delightful thud of a strong tackle is heard, they go off like car alarms shouting about how it should be a sending off. Even in cases when players win the ball, pundits will point to how dangerous the tackle ‘could have been’ with regards to different situations.
Make no mistake, there is such a thing as ‘serious foul play’. However, the scope for which this applies has seemingly widened thanks to just one poor refereeing decision. Kompany’s tackle, albeit two-footed, was not dangerous and should not have been a red card. However, the referee got it wrong, and we can forgive him that. What is worrying is the way people seem to believe that this one incident has changed the very constitution of football.
Everything is being compared to this one tackle, as if Chris Foy that day wrote a new law straight into the annals of football defining what ‘serious foul play’ is. It’s bizarre, flawed logic that has been picked up for reasons I don’t understand. Take for instance Frank Lampard’s disallowed goal at the World Cup in 2010. Are we to say that following on from that incident, any shot that lands just a few feet over the line is not a goal? Of course not. It’d be ridiculous for a commentator to say “Well, if Lampard’s shot wasn’t a goal, then how can that be?”
One of the good things about football referees is that their job is to interpret the law, not make it. It means that referees are not obliged to follow the lead of their peers constantly, and FIFA and the FA aren’t bang to rights on any decision refs might make. If you were to follow a system in which referees had to constantly revise their rule book as one official after another makes a slightly outlandish decision, the game just wouldn’t work, and Stuart Attwell would just become the most hated man in the world.
So it makes no sense to compare any tackle to Vincent Kompany’s. But what of tackling? Has it lost its place in the game? I’d like to think not. After all, the spate of ‘dangerous’ tackles in recent weeks haven’t really been a result of anything more than the odd moment of stupidity. Certainly Yakubu’s reckless challenge was worthy of a red, but I don’t think you can outlaw tackling on the basis of what Yakubu is capable of. Otherwise running would be banned too.
The fact is that in the past five or six seasons we’ve only seen a handful of serious injuries in the Premier League, most notably to Eduardo and Aaron Ramsey (and the latter was a result of bad fortune more than a bad tackle). Both of those incidents led to a long-winded media storm where everyone pondered the possibility of tackling being too dangerous for the sport. These eventually died down, but the little spates of worry we have about tackling seem to be getting much more common. It’s a worrying trend, and I don’t think it will be long before it gets discussed by FIFA.
It may be an extreme-case scenario that tackling might be banned, but any form of law change is certainly possible in times like these. There’s nothing preventing FIFA redefining the term ‘dangerous tackle’ to include a larger variety of incidents, thereby limiting the harm to players. I don’t believe that’s necessary. As long as we vilify any intentionally awful tackles, condemn any clumsy and dangerous ones and are realistic about plain strong tackling the amount of serious injuries will remain minimal.
Knocks are part of the game we love, and I think it’s only right that you have to be made of strong stuff to play football. It would be an absolute tragedy if the most physical and athletic aspect of defending was curbed by a media witchhunt. We’ve moved on from the tackles of yesteryear, where you would be lambasted for lacking commitment when not going in two-footed. For the better, that is in the past. But I don’t think we can, or should, go any further in our attempts to soften tackles in football.
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