Sitting in the stand watching Reading’s defeat by Nottingham Forest, I saw an incident that reinforced how fans and footballers, often misled by television pundits, get hold of little phrases about the laws that only lead to misunderstandings.
The incident was simple enough. A Forest player was chasing the ball back to his own penalty area when he played it with his knee back into his goalkeeper’s arms. The Reading footballers' arms were raised in expectation of a free kick and spectators around me were out of their seats shouting ‘back pass’. A touch of desperation perhaps as their team was a goal down at the time. But going home on the football special, I was asked by other supporters as to the legitimacy of the Forest’s player’s action and on Sunday I received a phone call from another avid supporter to query it.
At our training courses for new referees, we always ask whether they can name some offences that can be committed by the goalkeeper by handling in his own penalty area. Always, always, one answer we get is ‘the back pass’. We tell them we know what they mean but that little phrase does not appear anywhere in the Laws of the Game. The actual wording
says: ‘an indirect free-kick is awarded if a goalkeeper, in his own penalty area, touches the ball with his hands after it has been deliberately kicked to him by a team mate.
The two most important words are deliberately
and kicked. In football a kick can only be with the foot. Therefore this means that the goalkeeper can handle the ball if the player plays it back to him with any other part of his body, including the head, the chest and' as in this case, the knee.
When this law was first introduced to speed up and to some degree enliven the game, tactical adept players found that they could get round it by flicking the ball up with the foot and then heading it back to the goalkeeper. However, the International FA Board, which sets the laws, didn’t like this and outlawed it the following season, making it a cautionable offence at that. They called it a
'deliberate trick in an attempt to circumvent the law' and it doesn’t matter if the goalkeeper actually touches the ball or not. The free kick is given where the player plays the ball.
In the wording of the law, the term deliberately kicked, means that it has to be the intention of the player to kick the ball back to the goalkeeper. If the player tries to clear and for instance, slices his kick but the ball goes to the goalkeeper who handles it, that is not an offence.
I was also asked about another incident the same weekend as the Forest game, which happened in the Everton v West Brom match. The ball looked
as if was going into the goal but Everton’s Phil Jagielka rushed back and kicked it off the line and straight into the arms of his goalkeeper, Tim Howard, who was standing further along the goal line. I think it would have been most severe if the referee had judged he had deliberately kicked it to the goalkeeper, as all Jagielka was trying to do, was stop the ball crossing the line.
There is one other aspect to this law that sometimes raises a query. Take a player deliberately kicking the ball back to his goalkeeper but the kick is someway off the mark and looks like going into the goal. If the ‘keeper denies the opposing team a goal by deliberately (and illegally) handling the ball, should he be sent off as in Law 12? The answer is no, because this part of the law says that it does not apply to a goalkeeper in his own penalty area.
Dick Sawdon Smith
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© R Sawdon Smith 2009