Footballers are Angels who Never Cry Wolf

The Euros reach their climax this weekend and England will be hoping to join Spain on Sunday at 8pm in Berlin to end ’58 years of hurt’ bla, bla, bla and lift the Henri Delaunay trophy. Get past Holland tonight and even though it could be England’s 5th ‘S’ country opponents in the Euros, Spain will prove to be formidable finalists.

Has it been a classic tournament? The commentators will tell you it has been to keep us interested. They’ll scream ‘what a goal!’ when it’s a five-yard tap in and tell us the next game will be a classic because it’s two of the big guns playing. Truth is, aside from last night’s France v Spain semi-final, it’s been the unfancied sides like Georgia, Romania and Turkey who have been the real entertainers…not to mention the armies of fans, most notably the Dutch who have been hugely entertaining on social media. It’s been a tournament where the usual suspects have failed to deliver, whilst stars in the form of Arda Güler (Turkey), Khvicha Kvaratskhelia (Georgia) and sixteen-year-old Lamine Yamal (Spain) have been born – what a strike last night!

We all know the stakes are high and many teams will refuse to take risks….ummm, Gareth? We also know a lot of them, after a hectic season and playing in often humid conditions, can get a little 'tiredy', as did the below par Kylian Mbappé in his side’s quarter-final versus Portugal, bless him. You can have all the rest you want now mate!

But what really irks me is that players these days want EVERYTHING their own way. I’ll give you two examples but my second example is where I see the game really needing to sort itself out and hopefully the incident I reference and the suggested solution is something the authorities figure out for themselves sometime soon, because the problem is getting worse.

First up, criticism. We all know England have come in for their fair share of flak, but so have Italy, France, Scotland (to be expected) and many others. It’s clear they don’t like it, even when the facts are clear…there have been many underperforming sides in this tournament. Once upon a time footballers would only accept criticism from ‘football people’, this magical phrase which meant the person dishing out the criticism supposedly knew what they were talking about. Like when a player criticises the board for ‘not being football people’ as if there’s some sort of special code which unlocks every problem that only ‘football people’ know. Utter tosh!

So, when Gary Lineker and his buddies on BBC lay into Harry Kane and other members of the England team, guess what? Harry tells us Gary ‘should know better because he’s played the game.’ So, we can’t criticise you if we haven’t pulled on a shirt professionally and we can’t if we have? Blimey! Perfect world! Harry, you have been sub-standard, put your hand up and take it on the chin…you’ve had enough praise over the years, maybe if you acknowledge the fact that you’re playing like a man in his forties you’d get a little more sympathy rather than calls for you to start on the bench.

Next up, crying wolf. Players cheat to gain an advantage, as Rafa Benitez once said, ‘it’s a fact’! A player or manager will happily blame the ‘unfairness’ of VAR decisions or that a referee has missed something when the decision has gone against them but guess what when the roles are reversed? We all remember Arsene Wenger’s classic phrase ‘I did not see’! The hypocrisy never fails to amaze me. But the biggest crime on a football field is players feigning injury to get an advantage. How many times do we have to suffer players going down at the slightest touch to win a foul? The imaginary yellow card drove us all mad and, thankfully, it’s gone from the game. So why do we let these frauds get away with going down like they’ve been shot, rolling around five or six times and running like a spring chicken moments later? They’re all as bad as each other. Remember Rivaldo in the World Cup when he literally collapsed as if he had been shot?

Yet, when things get serious, they really get nasty and forget all of the crap they’ve dished out. Hungarian striker Barnabas Varga suffered a fractured cheekbone in his country’s final group game against Scotland, a game that would be both country’s last. It was an horrific scene with blankets held up as if the player was a horse that had fallen at the Grand National. Everyone feared the worst but the player has now, thankfully, been discharged. Understandably the Hungarian players and staff were critical of the time it took the medics to get on the pitch. I get it. Their teammate is in distress and they want action…we all would.

But is there a chance the medics perhaps didn’t react as quickly as they could have because of the play acting which infests football? Cut that out and you’d have a nailed-on case against the speed at which they reacted, but if you all continue to insult us with your pathetic ‘oh I’ve hurt my face’ when there’s absolutely NO CONTACT with your face, then don’t unleash hell.

Here’s an idea lads….why not make it easy for everyone to know when a player is injured and not go down and make like you’ve been run over by a train, in the hope that when it is serious everyone can rush on to you help you out without any delay?

But how do we get rid of it once and for all? I think it’s simple. Not one for the purists but nor is VAR, or the penalty shootout. We have to innovate to overcome and my solution could work. In fact it’s so simple that I’m surprised nobody has suggested it before.

If a player looks like he has been seriously injured (or shot), send everyone on to the pitch, get him off as quickly as possible and give him the attention he needs to tend to his injury for a minimum period of five minutes. He can come back on but in that five minutes he will be replaced by a temporary sub. No, it’s not ideal, but it will work. Because the thing about the temporary sub is that it might give the manager an excuse to sub the ‘injured’ player anyway even if he, surprise, surprise, turns out to be OK! Will the player want to give his manager an excuse to take him off? If the teams complain they don’t have a player ready to put on as a temporary sub (as they probably will) then either get up to speed and have your subs warming up in rotation – after all isn’t that what they should be doing anyway in the event of an injury? – or, take someone off temporarily on the other side to even up the numbers.

It’s a bit ‘5-a-side’ but who will want to feign injury if it means they could be permanently substituted? It might just stop them feigning injuries. Now wouldn’t that be nice. The time taken from the foul to play restarting also needs to be added on…we saw huge amounts of time added on at the last World Cup and, guess what, the players didn’t like it! So, stop wasting everyone’s time, stop cheating and only go down when you’re really crocked….and referee, keep adding the down time on! The BBC reported in 2022 that the average time the ball was in play during Premier League games was just 55 minutes or 61% of a 90-minute match! Don’t we pay to watch a 90-minute game of football?

My article is clearly aimed at the play acting during the Euros but applies to all games played by men, women, boys and girls…I can’t imagine we’re not seeing a significant amount of imitation at grassroots! The players need to be role models not rolling models.

Stop cheating!

Good luck England.!