The Red Card
In a relatively drab and uneventful 90 minutes, the glaring talking point is the moment the entire match turned on its head: Dan Ballard’s red card in the 24th minute. It was a red card by the letter of the law, that’s pretty hard to dispute. The problem, however, is the law itself.
Why has there been a sudden need to clamp down on any form of hair pull as violent conduct? How is it violent conduct or deemed dangerous? It is pretty self-evident that Ballard is trying to clutch Arokodare’s back in order
to pin the imposing striker, and accidentally also grabs his hair. The law is badly imposed, and needs an introduction of a form of force majeure applied based upon intent.
It is nonsensical that a tug of any body part, or contact with a bald head, will result in naught but a tug of hair, regardless of impact results in a red card and a three-match suspension – the same punishment given to recklessly endangering an opponent. Outcome should not always dictate the ruling, but the laws are giving an advantage to those long of hair, and how long before players just go down clutching their hair at every opportunity?
It is silly to have put himself in this position with a recent PGMOL clarification on the rule after the Lisandro Martinez incident, and it is a red, but (again) this law of the game is currently ridiculously extreme and ill-thought through. It actually speaks volumes that in the official rulebook on the FA website they state “there is no specific law, but it is deemed as violent conduct”. The PGMOL and FA are backing themselves into a corner where the next step will be forcing all players to tie their hair up. But hey, at least snoods are banned still.
VAR Humbug
It really is crap isn’t it? I don’t care that it helped us get here in the first place. Every goal is celebrated with angst of potentially being cancelled, every time a player drops to the floor or a ball whistles by a player’s hand you’re looking to the ref, and ultimately, it’s making decisions worse than they would’ve been without.
We all saw what referees were like when they’d drop down from the Premier League in a big match in the second tier. They don’t just need VAR; they have become utterly reliant upon it. Because, obviously, they are the only harbingers of fair justice in English football and the EFL refs aren’t deemed good enough to take charge, right?
Yes, the VAR officials still make the decisions and still apply them incorrectly, but they do that because the framework is in place no matter what. Human error still occurs, so just get rid of it all and put up with the said human error we already had. Goal-line technology has been an objectively successful implementation of technology because it is just that, objective. It has also been applied throughout the professional game. VAR has caused a split in how the professional game is refereed within our own shores, with Premier League sides now following a different interpretation of the rules to the EFL and beyond.
Defending Set Pieces
That period from the second half until about 60 minutes really was drab. In that time period we completed 11 (yes, eleven) passes. Granted, we were down to ten men and just trying to grind out a result – but we really need to improve our control of games.
Yet the biggest issue plaguing us at the moment is defending set pieces. For much of the first half of the season we seemed aerially dominant in our own penalty area, then teams changed tact. Since they all discovered just how brutally effective Robin Roefs is at clutching a whipped corner out of the air, teams are bypassing him entirely.
In the least three games, we’ve shipped five goals from set pieces, all looped to the back post. All in Trai Hume’s zone. Hume will be disappointed with this, but the bigger question is, why aren’t we adapting? We have a set-piece coach and a host of others in the coaching staff who all will likely have pointed this out, but we are still unable to defend that back post. Three chances today, three goals last week, one goal and two big chances the week before. In the Forest game, we were undone by the same move, to the same player, from the same crosser *three* times in ten minutes.
Mathematical Safety
We’ve done it. The first team since 2023 to get promoted and stay up. While aspirations are now loftier, that is because of our own success. This is now our third-highest Premier League points total. We’ll not be able to eclipse the top two of 58 and 57 set under Reidy in the glory days of those successive seventh-place finishes, but have now reached 47, the mark set by Steve Bruce in 2010 as we finished in the top ten of the top flight for only the fifth time in 70 years.
While dreams of Europe likely slip away, a top ten finish and placing ahead of them lot up the road remain realistic targets.
We are back, and we ain’t going anywhere just yet.
