There was a moment during Newcastle’s draw with Liverpool on Sunday that initially didn’t look particularly significant. Will Osula had taken a knock and was clearly struggling. He tried to run it off, continued moving around the pitch and carried on despite looking increasingly uncomfortable. Usually, the obvious response would be to go down, allow the physio onto the pitch and get the problem assessed properly before deciding whether he could continue. This season, however, that decision comes
with an additional consequence. Under the Premier League’s new approach to injury stoppages, a player who requires treatment or assessment on the pitch must remain off for at least one minute after the restart, doubled from the 30 seconds previously required. Against Liverpool, in a tight game where Newcastle needed every player on the pitch at all times, suddenly asking for treatment wasn’t quite such a straightforward decision and Osula carried on. The news that has now broken makes that moment even more significant. According to the Chronicle Live and other outlets, Newcastle are set to be without Osula for the next couple of weeks because of the aforementioned injury. There is nothing to suggest staying on the pitch caused the final injury or made it worse and it would be wrong to make that connection without medical evidence. Newcastle’s first game of the season offered a clear example of the potential problem with a rule introduced for perfectly understandable reasons. Football wants to stop players pretending to be injured, but… has it accidentally given genuinely injured players a reason to pretend that they aren’t?
Newcastle couldn’t afford to lose a player
A minute sounds insignificant until you imagine Newcastle trying to contain Liverpool with ten men. When a game is stretched, players are tiring and one mistake can change the result, voluntarily taking somebody off the pitch for sixty seconds is a genuine disadvantage and the player knows that too.
Osula wasn’t making his decision in a medical capacity with a physio and plenty of time to consider what he was feeling. He was making it in the middle of a Premier League game, with adrenaline flowing and a team who needed him.
That is where the new rule creates an uncomfortable calculation. How badly am I hurt? Can I run it off? Can I get through another couple of minutes? Is it worth leaving the team a man short while I get checked? Those are questions a footballer shouldn’t really have to answer alone.
Last season, getting the physio onto the pitch carried less of a consequence. The medical staff could assess the player and make a more informed decision about whether continuing was sensible.
With Osula now facing time on the sidelines, supporters are entitled to wonder whether the rule is encouraging players to make the wrong decision in the heat of the moment and potentially worsen the injury.
Fotball has brought this on itself
It’s difficult to criticise the Premier League too heavily for trying something different because all of us who regularly watch football know exactly why these rules are appearing.
Injury stoppages had become increasingly tactical. A team comes under sustained pressure and suddenly somebody needs treatment. The physio comes on, the game stops, players get a drink and the manager has an opportunity to deliver instructions. Two minutes later, the supposedly injured player is sprinting around without any obvious problem.
We all know what we’re watching, the difficulty for a referee is proving it. An official can’t look at somebody lying on the floor and decide they don’t appear sufficiently injured to receive medical treatment. Apart from being impossible to judge accurately, it would create a far more serious player welfare problem. Football therefore needed another deterrent.
If receiving treatment comes with a consequence, the thinking is that players who don’t genuinely need it will be less inclined to manufacture a stoppage. It makes complete sense until somebody really is hurt.
The boy who cried wolf comes to mind
Footballers have spent so long exploiting injury stoppages that the authorities have eventually introduced measures designed to discourage them. Now the genuine injuries risk becoming caught up in the response.
Osula’s situation has brought that concern into sharper focus because this is no longer just a theoretical argument about what might happen. Newcastle have already seen a player continue through an injury.
Osula is exactly why it needs watching
Osula makes this more than a hypothetical concern, we all watched him limping round the pitch and trying to continue on. That might simply have been the instinct of a competitive footballer who wants to stay on the pitch but it might also be exactly the behaviour the new rule unintentionally encourages.
Newcastle have a relatively young squad and Jaissle wants them playing at high intensity. That inevitably means knocks, fatigue and players occasionally pushing their bodies towards the limit. The club can’t afford to create a culture where staying on the pitch for the team when injured is considered the brave decision.
Sometimes the right decision is still to go down, to tell the physio something doesn’t feel right and let the coaching or medical staff make that decision. Playing with ten men for a minute is considerably less damaging than losing somebody for weeks because they continued on an injury that should have been assessed.
The wider lesson remains the same, players should not feel that asking for treatment is letting their teammates down.
Newcastle have responsibility here too
The answer isn’t necessarily changing the rule immediately, there is a responsibility on Newcastle and every other club to adapt to it. If Osula was struggling and the medical staff believed he needed assessing, the possibility of playing with ten for a minute had to become irrelevant. Jaissle and his coaching staff may need to be more decisive from the touchline too. Players will naturally want to stay on, a young player trying to establish himself in a new manager’s team is hardly likely to volunteer to leave the pitch unless he feels he has no other choice.
Newcastle will also have to become smarter about how they manage the temporary disadvantage. If a player does require treatment, slow the game down legally, reorganise quickly and make sure everyone understands how the team defends the next sixty seconds.
It becomes another piece of game management, we have already seen against Liverpool how important those small moments can be.
A rule worth keeping an eye on
Iactually understand what football is trying to achieve here. Watching matches repeatedly interrupted by suspicious injuries has become frustrating and once teams realised stoppages could be used tactically, it was inevitable that more would start doing it.
Something needed to change. The concern is whether the solution places too much responsibility on the genuinely injured player to decide how much pain is enough to justify disadvantaging his team.
Osula shouldn’t have to make that calculation, neither should any player. If somebody is hurt, the medical staff need to assess them and if that means playing with ten players for sixty seconds, so be it.
The players themselves may also have to accept that looking after their bodies occasionally means putting the team at a temporary disadvantage. There is nothing heroic about struggling through an injury if it turns a problem that needed treatment into a longer spell on the sidelines.
Football created the need for this rule by allowing injury stoppages to become part of the tactical game but now clubs including Newcastle have to make sure the response doesn’t create another problem.
Newcastle got an early glimpse of that dilemma against Liverpool and the subsequent news about Osula has made the issue more relevant, not because it proves the new rule is responsible for his injury, but because it shows the real consequences of a player trying to stay on the pitch when treatment may have been the more sensible option.
The new rule might make football quicker, reduce time wasting and discourage the theatrical injuries that have frustrated supporters for years. If it does all of those things, it could we prove worthwhile but can’t come at the expense of players feeling unable to say when they are genuinely hurt.
Join the conversation!
Sign up for a user account at Coming Home Newcastle and get:
- Create community posts on The Feed for everyone to read
- Comment on all articles and community posts
- Rec comments and community posts
- Enjoy a new, improved notifications system
- Fewer ads
