Football is a tough, competitive, and potentially dangerous sport. Players can get kicks to the head as well as them sometimes being on the end of leg breaking challenges. These are risks that you just have to accept in the sport.
Everyone that enters the field of play knows this, it’s often ‘win at all costs’ and that’s how it should be. It is the sole reason the sport is so popular. Players through any which way possible, whether it be creativity, gamesmanship, skill, speed, toughness, strength or improvisation want to score more goals than the opponent. Fans want to see this too.
Football without the above would be as interesting as a board game played by a family who think ‘taking part is the most important thing’.
I’m a winner, I like to win, I play the game at an amateur level, and the results in our season won’t cost anyone millions of pounds come May, but I still hate to lose. As a human being I believe there should always be that competitive edge, that will to strive to be the best you can be. It brings togetherness and the enjoyment of victory along with your team mates. Now when the results do add up to teams winning millions of pounds, and there are also millions watching on, imagine what the pressure is like to succeed. Nobody wants to see a ‘bottler’, someone who backs out of a challenge and seemingly isn’t giving his all to the cause. Fans boo this kind of behaviour, and rightly so.
So where am I going with all this?
Cameron Jerome’s disallowed goal, is what I wish to talk about. To me, not allowing that goal is an absolutely abysmal decision. I realise it’s against the team many of you reading this support, but unfortunately this is the incident which stands out for me on this opening weekend.
Making his Premier League debut referee Simon Hooper had an absolute ‘mare. In such an important period of the game for Norwich City in an intense battle for some early points on the board, you simply cannot make that decision. It’s a superb piece of skill and Jerome’s only intention was scoring a goal for his side.
As soon as this type on inventive overhead goal starts being disallowed, it will lead to further questions being asked. What else are we going to crack down on? How far will safety measures go towards ruining the sport we all love? We all know exactly what the difference between dangerous and not dangerous, and this ‘goal’ was certainly the latter.
A high foot with intent on injuring in a one versus one situation *could* in some circumstances be considered worthy of a yellow or even red card and a free-kick, but Jerome had his back to goal with his eyes on the ball. I mean heading a ball in itself is dangerous, clashes of heads take place, shall we introduce head height rules in football to combat that issue?
The point is, that you will never make football 100% safe and the sometimes over zealous attempts at doing this could ruin the game, making players question everything they do in fear of it being dangerous. Eventually leading to fans being, well, bored of it.
Over time the introduction of too many rules looking after the welbeing of players to a level not needed could take away that never say die attitude footballers have in their attempt to entertain us fans and keep the game alive. In a world where football is quickly already being talked about as a shadow of its former glories we can’t afford to ban use of the overhead kick.
Hopefully this isn’t something we see again.
A great win for Palace yesterday, but for me as a neutral, it wasn’t a victory for football.
