Nasty or part of the game?
Just recently Fulham’s Bobby Zamora suffered a broken leg in a tackle by Wolves midfielder Karl Henry. The same player was then fined two weeks wages by Wolves after getting himself sent-off for a horror tackle on Jordi Gomez of Wigan last Saturday.
Shocking
Newcastle’s Hatem Ben Arfa also had his leg broken in a fairly shocking challenge by Manchester City’s Nigel De Jong, who has been left out of the Dutch squad as a result.
Fulham boss Mark Hughes was outraged by a reckless tackle by Stoke’s Andy Wilkinson in a recent Carling Cup tie that saw Wilkinson booked and Fulham’s Moussa Dembele injured and out for a while.
Blame
Fulham’s Danny Murphy has spoken out to blame managers for the way players are playing. He suggests that the way managers get their players pumped up and the way that they instruct their teams to ‘stop other teams playing’ is leading to the type of bad challenges we have been seeing.
“They can say it’s effective and they have got to win games, but the fact is the managers are sending out their players so pumped up there are inevitably going to be problems. Your manager dictates what your players do and how you behave. Every ship has a captain and that’s the manager who is in charge. You get managers who are sending their teams out to stop other teams playing, which is happening more and more, the Stokes, Blackburns, Wolves.”
Reckless
Recently the Professional Footballers’ Association chief executive Gordon Taylor has said that reckless tackles are endangering the careers of too many players. Also, the Chief medical officer of FIFA, Dr Michel d’Hooghe, has also been very outspoken.
“Some players come on the field simply to provoke injuries in other persons, to break a career. I have two eyes, where I can see what happens, how some acts are really criminal.”
Responsible
Fulham skipper Murphy agrees that players responsible should be appropriately dealt with.
“The pace in which some players go into tackles now is ridiculous. There’s no brains involved in the players who are doing that. I don’t believe players are going out to break another player’s leg but there has to be some logic and intelligence involved. If you are going at someone at a certain pace and you don’t get it right you are going to hurt them. Players should be culpable for that, in terms of punishment I don’t know what, but they need to show a little bit more intelligence, especially the ones who are doing it repeatedly.”
Physical
Unsurprisingly, the players at the clubs accused by Murphy are not too pleased about it. The captain of one of those clubs, Kevin Davies at Bolton, is a man who has been criticised several times for his over physical play, most notably by Sir Alex Ferguson. Davies totally denies that his team are reckless.
“I haven’t seen the comments but there is a lot going around at the minute and there has been a couple of bad injuries which is not nice to see. In terms of players at Bolton, and the way we play the game, we never have played like that. We try to win the game in the best way we can, but no manager has ever said ‘you are playing a certain side and you need to rough them up a bit’. If anything our players are little bit too honest. I play the game a certain way and with the speed of the game today you are going to be a little bit out in a few tackles. I take a lot of hits myself but I don’t complain about it. It’s a part of the game I enjoy. The physical side is going out of football at the moment.”
Brutal
Everton’s Phil Neville has joined Davies in suggesting that things are less ‘brutal’ now than they ever have been.
“Ten or fifteen years ago when I was faced with a tricky left winger the first thing I had to do was boot him up in the air. I don’t think we tackle as hard as we used to. Tackling is part of the game, we just need to outlaw the two-footed challenge that has crept into the game.”
So who is right? Is football going soft, or are we in a phase of particularly nasty tactics and tackling?
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