Another soccer final has been ruined by a referee’s decision to award a penalty kick.
In the first minute of the UEFA Champions League final,
the ball ricocheted off the chest and then the upper arm of the Potato Tots’ Moussa Sissoko. (He’d extended his arm to gesture to a teammate.) The referee blew the whistle for the penalty kick.
A deliberate handball? Not a chance.
A penalty? Alas, by today’s refereeing standards, yes. The operators of the Video Assistant Refereeing system deemed the call not controversial enough to review.
(
Here are some TV pundits disagreeing about the rule. As usual, Alejandro Moreno makes a jackass of himself.)
After converting the penalty, Liverpool – usually one of the most proactive teams in the sport – sat back and “parked the bus” of defenders in front of the attacking Potato Tots.
A game-long slog ensued. Finally, with just a few minutes to play, Liverpool scored again.
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In soccer, a single goal is momentous. It releases enormous tension. It affects all subsequent developments. But VAR has multiplied the number of penalty kicks awarded, and hence the number of goals scored, cheapening their value. And now the rules have been changed so that every handball, intentional or not, that occurs inside the handler’s box is to be punished with a penalty kick.
With this policy, and with VAR to enforce it, we should expect games to have penalty kicks awarded in them more often than not. That is, we should expect games to have more goals – and of the cheapest kind.
We should expect shooters to aim at defenders’ arms rather than at the goal. (Certainly, the Liverpool forward wasn’t aiming toward the goal when he kicked the ball at Sissoko.)
We should expect goals to be scored quickly – before either team has fully implemented its attacking strategy.
We should expect a scoring team to adopt tedious “bus-parking” tactics earlier in the game.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Therefore, I offer a modest proposal for handballs committed by non-goalkeepers:
(1) Let every handball that occurs outside the handler’s box be governed under the old rules.
(2) Let every clearly intentional handball, inside or outside the box, be punished by carding, according to the old rules.
(3) Let every handball that occurs inside the handler’s box, whether intentional or not, be punished, as the new policy requires.
But let the punishment be an indirect free kick inside the box, not a direct penalty kick.
Exception to (3): Let a direct penalty kick be the punishment for an unintentional or intentional defensive handball that results straightforwardly from an indirect free kick taken by an attacker inside the box. (Here, we’ll have to make a somewhat arbitrary stipulation, e.g., that a defensive handball
results “straightforwardly” from an indirect free kick taken inside the box just in case, after the initial kick but prior to the ball’s touching the hand, the ball doesn’t leave the box – or something along those lines.)
This is the best rule combination I can think of. But I wouldn’t mind if FIFA simply went back to the old rules that focused on intent.
I also would accept this option:
Let FIFA’s new rules remain in effect, with the additional stipulation that all direct penalty kicks for handballs be taken by
Martín Palermo.
Update: Perhaps the exception to (3) should include all free kicks, not just indirect free kicks taken inside the box, to discourage defenders from using their hands to block free kicks taken outside the box.
With this in mind:
Let a direct penalty kick be the punishment for an unintentional or intentional defensive handball that
results, inside the box, straightforwardly from a free kick taken by an attacker, where a handball is understood to have resulted, inside the box, straightforwardly from a free kick just in case, after the initial kick but prior to the ball’s touching the hand, the ball touches no player outside the box.
