The infamous rage of Manchester United players against referee Andy D’Urso, when practically the whole team,
led by then captain Roy Keane and present captain Rio Ferdinand snarling in his face,
forced him to continually retreat, is one of low points in footballers/referees relations.
Certainly for D’Urso it affected his refereeing career and he is no longer a Premiership referee. Having gone through such a trauma it is unlikely that the loud and prolonged booing by Reading fans would have worried him too much. The reason for their displeasure was his failure to award a penalty to Reading in their FA Cup Tie against Burnley.
Since then I have regularly been asked, was it a penalty? My friends in the East Stand phrased it rather differently and in the
Post, Jonny Fordham from his seat high in the press box, wrote that it was a blatant penalty.
Having looked at it two or three times on television, I’m not at all sure it was a penalty and,
at the least, a very difficult one to call. Reading winger, Jobi McAnuff, had burst into the Burnley penalty area with a Burnley defender in close attendance just behind him, when he fell to the ground, seemingly brought down by his pursuer. I have said in the past in this column, a trip does not have to be intentional to be a foul. I’m sure all Royals fans will remember their first ever game in the Premiership when they lost to Aston Villa by penalty given away by Ibrahima Sonko. Sonko didn’t deliberately trip his opponent but stumbled and fell onto the back of his legs. As the attacker was clear with only the goalkeeper to beat, Sonko was also sent for denying an obvious goal scoring opportunity.
There is another point though that is often forgotten and that is there is nothing in the laws that says a player has to get out of the way of an opponent. In fact in the book on the Laws of the Game, under guidance to referees, 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’.
What this refers to mainly is when a player runs into another player and then claims he had been blocked by the opponent. It can also have other repercussions. For instance I was mentoring a young referee who was having a very good game but with one contentious issue in the first half. A defender was closely monitoring an opposing forward who received the ball. The attacker turned with the ball running directly into the defender and went down. The crowd shouted for a foul which he didn’t give. ‘Was I right?’ he asked me at half time. I told him that in my opinion he had made the correct decision because the defender had not moved into the way of the opponent, he had merely held his ground.
What’s this got to do with Reading’s non-penalty? Simply this, when McAnuff ran in front of his opponent, the defender did not change his direction, he did not reach out with his leg to try an intercept the ball, he merely held his line. McAnuff’s fall was caused by his moving across the opponent. So it’s not a dive, there was contact but the contact was caused by the attacker and not the defender.
A tough call to make and it would have been easy to have given a penalty in front of the home crowd with the score at nil-nil. Easier than not to give it. It shows that the Manchester United episode may have blighted his refereeing career but Andy D’urso still has the guts to make tough decisions.
Dick Sawdon Smith
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