A Scar On The Face Of The Beautiful Game

LIKE most of Europe, I sat down last night to watch Real Madrid v Barcelona, and got up two hours later a bit deflated. The right team won, but the beautiful game this was not. It came across as a slightly slowed-down Old Firm game in which the passes stuck, not the classic we were promised.

Why? Well perhaps, at the very top level, the rewards are now such that winning, rather than being the main thing, has indeed become the only thing. It doesn't matter how you do it, WIN, is the message to players and managers - who will bend or break any rule in an effort to get the only result which counts.

I've been saying for a long time, football has a problem with the perception of it being, at the highest level, so-organised that it's easier to cheat than to try to win fairly and the only way this scar on the beautiful game can be erased is by a root and branch overhaul of the laws, a zero tolerance approach to playing within these laws and ultra-strict policing of these harder laws.

Of course for this to happen the men who run the game will need to show a much-greater desire to sort things out than they have hitherto. There is, as far as I can see, no demand within FIFA, UEFA, the individual football associations or, in our own wee corner of the football world, the SFA, SPL or SFL, to grasp the nettle and sort things out.

If the SFA, the body which shaped football in the 1870s, cannot be bothered putting matters right, what hope is there for the allegedly corrupt new nations who don't have our history and respect for the game.

Let's take just one aspect of Wednesday night's game - the mob-handed badgering of the referee to either get an opponent yellow-carded or to try to prevent one of their own being censured.

I am old enough to remember the great Wolverhampton Wanderers and West Bromwich Albion European friendlies with Moscow Dynamo and Honved in the early 1950s; grainy black and white images, beamed from smoke-shrouded Midlands grounds. Two memories stick, West Brom trainee David Burnside's half-time ball-juggling act and Kenneth Wolstenholme informing we viewers that the reason one of the European teams' captain was wearing a white bandage round his left arm was: "To denote that he is the captain and therefore the only player allowed to speak to the referee".

Today in rugby, team captains don't wear armbands to signify their position, but, if the referee has a contentious decision to make - such as sending a player to the sin-bin for ten minutes on a yellow card - he summons the captain and tells him why his man is going off. There is no back chat, just mutual respect, the captain is given his place, the referee his. So much more civilised than the snarling rabble around a football yellow card issuing.

How I long for a referee calling both managers and both captains to his room before the kick-off, or better still doing it in the centre circle before the toss-up and telling them: "Right, I will speak to the captains and only to the captains; any other player who approaches me during the game will be yellow-carded. If I am to issue a yellow or red card, I will call forward the captain and the player I am about to book or send off and any other player who approaches me will be yellow-carded - do you understand me?"

On being told they do, he should then instruct them to pass-on the word and, once the game starts - stick to his guns. We might get a few five-a-sides in the first few weeks, but I am sure things would soon calm down.

Then there is the way players throw themselves to the ground, roll for several yards and lie there screaming. Again, easily dealt with - simply announce that if a player requires treatment on the park, he must go off and cannot return for five minutes. This would give physios time to properly repair genuinely injured players and would soon weed-out the play-acting.

I see nothing wrong with football introducing rugby's ten-minutes in the sin-bin for yellow cards, but I would also think of introducing hockey's green card sanction - this would cover mistimed tackles and the like, five minutes in the sin-bin for this; second offence, yellow card and ten minutes. If nothing else this would clean-up tackling and force coaches to improve the poor quality of one of the game's basics which we see today.

I would also introduce the deliberate foul. We all know what these are and it is ridiculous that currently these blots on the game carry no greater sanction than a yellow card. A deliberate foul would, for the first offence, carry the sanction of a yellow-card, with ten minutes in the sin-bin, plus, if not a penalty kick, regardless of where on the park the offence was committed, then maybe something like the ice hockey penalty: where the player taking the kick starts his run from half-way and has to beat the goalkeeper in a one-on-one confrontation via one continuous run and shot.

What's wrong with the basketball system of counting up fouls, both personal and team? In that game, five individual fouls and you're out of the game, but can be replaced, while, after a set number of fouls by one team, each defensive foul thereafter is punished by a free throw, in football a penalty kick.

Football is the world's most-popular game, but, at the top level, it is a mess and the game's authorities MUST clean up its act - Wednesday night showed how vital and necessary this clean-up is.

Abolish the cheats and the cheating and like players such as Lionel Messi flourish - simples.