Last week I had a phone call from former well-known local referee and one time rugby correspondent for the
Evening Post, Nigel Sutcliffe. I confidently answered his question on the phone but, when I checked afterwards, I found that things weren't quite as clear as I had said.
Nigel's question was, 'where in the present Laws of the Game, does it tell you what is a fair charge?' Someone else recently asked me: 'Is the shoulder charge still allowed?'
One thing Nigel was right about was that, in his days as a referee, the Laws of the Game did contain a description of a fair charge, although it wasn't very detailed. Pre 1997, in Law 12 it said, 'charging fairly,
i.e. with the shoulder.'
As I explained to Nigel and, as I have explained before in this column, when they rewrote the laws in 1997, they slimmed them down. This may seem to have been a good thing but actually quite a lot was left out without any explanation. However a second book,
Advice on the Application of the Laws, was published, which was supposed to contain many of the answers. It was here that I told Nigel he would find a description of a fair charge.
However, when I put the phone down, I decided to check my facts and, to my surprise, nowhere in that book does such a description appear. I was certain that I had seen one somewhere, so I turned to the teaching notes I was given when I passed my course to become an FA Licensed Referee Instructor. Surely if it my job to train new referees, it must be spelt out somewhere. All the notes actually say is: 'A fair charge is at normal contact speed, anything faster, in the referee's opinion, could be an offence'. Not much help there then. It does seem strange when you think about it, that nowhere is it possible to find an official description of what constitutes charging fairly.
So what is a fair charge? I can only give you my own interpretation but it is one that I think is very much accepted by most people in the game.
First of all, a fair charge has to be with the shoulder. That's what it used to say in the laws and, although it has now been left out, I don't think there has been any change. But it has to be carried out with the arm kept to the side - once a player raises his arm it becomes a push. So often a player lifts his arm from the elbow to heave off an opponent and then wonders why a free kick has been given against him.
The next thing is that it has to be shoulder to shoulder. Charging anywhere else, in the back or the chest, may endanger the opponent's safety. Also, to make it fair, the shoulder-to-shoulder charge must be committed when the opponent is within playing distance of the ball. Although that is another clause from the old laws that was left out, it has appeared in the back of the
Laws of the Game this year, under a new 'questions and answers' section.
The laws don't describe a fair charge, but what they say about charging is this: 'A direct free-kick is awarded, if a player charges an opponent in a manner, considered by the referee, to be careless, reckless or using excessive force'.
So my answer to Nigel and my other enquirer is that charging is still a legitimate part of
football but, to be fair, it has to be shoulder to shoulder and, as it says in my teaching notes, implemented at a reasonable pace.
Dick
Sawdon Smith