Your analysis of the play and the game coincides perfectly with the UK tabloids and with no one else in the world. All I see when I peruse British commentary on the game is a sad variant of a worn theme - jungle living darkies maul our noble men and how dare they!
The video you shared shows Kane initiating contact and then stumbling and tumbling Neymar style. It was a command performance expertly delivered by canny players in front of an incompetent official. Video shot from the other side of the play, conveniently neglected in your film study, shows Kane's arm around Sanchez's neck and in that view it's even more apparent that the contact was Kane's. Again, literally everyone in the world other than British fans and the media that serves them knows that this was a fucked up penalty and has said so, loudly.
But you know something? That's football. It doesn't bother me all that much that occasionally a referee misses something. Oh, he didn't VAR the penalty, by the way, it just seemed like it since the Colombians spent five minutes before the penalty kick imploring him to do so. The human element is part of the game for better and for worse and I can live with that. What I cannot abide is the faux outrage on the part of English fans everywhere who insist that their fair headed sons were mistreated by shadowy colonials of various remote outpost and indeterminate tongue whilst our men, who, after all, invented the game, and are, let's be frank, better bred, showed stiff upper lip and sterner stuff in the face of furious attack on the part of the uncultured amateurs of sport, what what.
So fuck that. And it disappoints me that you'd fall into what is basically the World Cup equivalent of Trump's MS-13 fiction but you did and you do and so here we are.
I'm not going to get into a back-and-forth over the penalty, because we clearly have very different opinions on it.
I will point out though, that my original post was to criticize Geiger and the only mention of the penalty was the 4 - 5 minutes Geiger allowed the Colombians to harass and harangue him (while they hilarious scuffed up the penalty spot) and all that ended with Henderson getting booked. It was only later, when you focused in on the penalty incident only, that I responded to that.
I never claimed that the English players were/are paragons of virtue. Lindgard risked a second yellow for an in-box tumble and Maguire similarly wasn't sanctioned for his easy fall (benefitting from what seemingly appears to be the rule that it's ok if you apologize afterwards). But had an English player been sent off in that match, while Colombia finished with 11, that would have been a grand injustice had it impacted the result.
Henderson certainly exaggerated the force of the headbutt he got from Barrios. Playacting is a scourge - it's been calculated that poster child Neymar has already spent 14 minutes rolling on the floor this World Cup. Yet we have seen numerous moments in this tournament when a player declines to fall over under illegal contact and the referees do not give the foul. The players are responsible for their own behavior, but gutless refereeing has driven some of that behavior.
The fact that the sport has decided that it's long overdue that they properly police the melee that occurs at every set piece around the box is causing heartburn, but only because we are in the crossover between the new - correct - treatment of such shenanigans, and the modification of ingrained player behavior. England's Stones was punished for a shove on a defender at a corner; unfortunately, the punishment for an infraction by a defender is far more severe than for one by an attacker.
For the record, to address the above imbalance of consequences, I don't believe that every foul in the penalty area should be a penalty. Unless the foul denies an obvious goal-scoring opportunity, it should be merely a defendable kick from the spot of the foul (i.e. a wall etc.). I also think penalties should be given for DOGSOs outside the box. These two changes would allow referees to be more forthright in punishing infractions in the penalty area because they aren't almost always penalizing the offending team with a goal against them, while address the unfairness of not getting a penalty when being clean on goal but caught just the wrong side of the arbitrary line.
The foul on Kane didn't merit the award of, essentially, a penalty goal; the
"foul" on Robben against Mexico a couple of tournaments ago didn't merit one either. De-emphasise the punishment by eliminating the spot kick as punishment for non-goal denying infractions, and raise the bar as to what is required to give a penalty, and you will help referees by removing at least some of the temptation from players.
Show Posts
