Had Glenn Nyberg awarded a penalty after Gabriel handled David Raya’s goal-kick in Tuesday night’s Champions League match at the Emirates, it would have been interesting to see the reaction of Thomas Tuchel, head coach of grand, old, noble Bayern Munich.
We know what Harry Kane’s reaction would have been – plant the ball on the spot, wait for Raya to dive ludicrously early and roll in his umpteenth goal of the season. But Bayern has always prided itself on being a principled institution. How would taking a goal from the most innocent, most rare, most hapless of mix-ups have sat with the spirit of the game?
They could not have refused to take the penalty, and good luck trying to tell Kane to deliberately miss it. But had it been given and converted, would Tuchel have told his players to allow Arsenal to score?
We all know the answer to that one, and Tuchel’s post-match comments confirmed it. In fact, the above scenario is utterly preposterous … in the way that the idea that there remains any sort of ‘spirit of the game’ is equally preposterous.
Certainly not at elite level, where elite cheats have never been so numerous. The biggest malfunction of the VAR system and the disciplinary process is that it is not getting rid of the constant con-artistry that has long been a plague on the professional game.
Take the Ben White incident at Brighton last weekend. The only repercussion for White from his shameless, pathetic play-acting was ridicule on social media. At the end of the match, Pervis Estupinan shook White’s hand. Why? There was only one thing White was trying to do, Pervis, and that was to get you, a fellow professional, sent off.
Honour, to varying extent, still exists in other sports. One of the most famous quotes in golf came from Bobby Jones in 1925 when he called a penalty on himself during the first round of the US Open, which he ended up losing in a play-off.
When praised for his sportsmanship and honesty, Jones disdainfully replied: “You might as well praise me for not robbing a bank.” And golf still has a code of honour, while snooker players also call fouls on themselves.
Obviously, footballers cannot do that – but they could stop trying to get their fellow pros sent off by duping officials. That would be a start. But, of course, they will not, because cheating has become the instinctive norm. Or has long been the norm.
From limited dealings with the young man, there is no nicer guy in football than Bukayo Saka. But there he was on Tuesday night, having to be dragged away from Nyberg, raging at the Swedish referee for not awarding Arsenal a last-second penalty, which was ironic considering the official’s leniency over the Raya-Gabriel mix-up.
In those dying moments, Saka went out of his way to kick Manuel Neuer’s leg, simple as that. The estimable Nyberg was not conned, no penalty, and no big deal in the grand scheme of things. Just a reminder that even the nicest are not immune to football’s plague of con-artistry. Sad.
