A few days ago I stopped to watch a schoolboys kick-about. I always have difficulty in passing any football or cricket being played, no matter what level of game.
Although not a proper match it was not a spontaneous kick-about, as it was being supervised by a teacher, who was also acting as referee. He awarded a corner and what intrigued me was that one of the attackers went and stood in front of the goalkeeper, preventing him moving off his line.
It’s amazing, I thought, how tactics like this are quickly picked up from the professional game. It was particularly interesting, because a couple of Saturdays before, on BBC
Match of the Day, there were two almost identical incidents in successive games, but which resulted in the ball finishing in the net. In one, the attacker was penalised and in the other the goal was allowed to stand.
The first game was Bolton against Liverpool when referee Rob Styles ruled out a goal by Bolton’s Gary Cahill by deciding that a foul had been committed on Liverpool keeper Pepe Reina. This provided the excuse for an angry protest by Bolton fans. Liverpool manager, Rafael Benitez, was unmoved, however, and afterwards made a rather strange claim; ‘There is an international rule that says the six-yard box is for the goalkeeper. It was clear; Reina had three players in front of him so it’s a free kick’.
Bolton manager, Gary Megson, was puzzled by this explanation saying ‘I must have missed that rule’. Well, of course there is no such rule. Megson went even further and claimed that referee Styles should have instead awarded a penalty against Reina for pushing his skipper, Kevin Nolan, ‘off his toes’. To be fair, I think that if someone was standing on your toes, you’d feel perfectly justified in pushing him off.
Rob Styles has a history in the last couple of seasons for dropping clangers in his decisions and having to apologise for them afterwards, so was this another? If we look at the reason why Nolan was stepping on Reina’s toes, I think it is quite clear that it was simply to prevent the goalkeeper from getting to the ball when it was crossed from the corner. Nolan was penalised under the part of the Laws known as
'impeding'. It says ‘an indirect free-kick will be awarded to the opposing team if a player impedes the progress of an opponent’.
Many people think this only refers to players out on the field, as it contains the mitigation clause that impeding by shielding the ball from an opponent is perfectly legitimate, providing the player remains within playing distance of the ball. But does it also refer to standing in the way of goalkeepers?
Players have said to me, ‘As I can’t be offside from a corner, I can stand where I like’. Sounds logical and in the
Interpretation of the Laws and Guidelines for Referees in the back of the
Laws of the Game, it states, ‘All players have a right to their position on the field of play, being in the way of an opponent is not the same as moving into the way of an opponent’. However, it also says, ‘It is an offence to restrict the movement of the goalkeeper by unfairly impeding him, e.g. at the taking of a corner’. So Rob Styles was right.
In the other game, Blackburn’s ex-England goalkeeper, Paul Robinson, was blocked by Sunderland players but the goal counted. With everything that happens in the penalty area at corners these days, when it is more like a tag wrestling match, I can only think the referee missed the impeding.
In the schoolboys kick-about, I can’t tell what the teacher would have done because the corner-taker messed up his kick and it never got near the goal.
Dick Sawdon Smith
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© R Sawdon Smith 2008