We have officially ruined football. If you’re anything like us, you no longer tune in for Monday Night Football but simply open up Twitter at 10pm, see which video official’s name is trending and click to find out what body movement people are calling unnatural this week.
The latest is crossing our arms in front of us. That’s not allowed, it’s not a normal human movement. Except, when you think about it, this is the absolutely understandable course of action for a footballer these days given the previously ordained ‘unnatural positions’ their contemporaries have been penalised for taking in the last few years.
A quick recap: Less than 25 seconds into the 2019 Champions League final Liverpool were awarded a penalty when Sadio Mane flicked the ball up at Moussa Sissoko, who had the temerity to point his arm out as a gesture to a nearby teammate. That’s a handball these days, we were told. It’s not natural to point.
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Wind forward a couple of years and Eric Dier goes up for a challenge with Andy Carroll. The Newcastle United striker wins the header, with the ball deflecting back off Dier’s arm on the Tottenham Hotspur player’s blind side. Penalty given. Having your arm out by your side as you jump is the most unnatural thing known to man all of a sudden.
The law cited after each such incident is the one which claims that teams should be penalised if “the hand/arm has made the player’s body unnaturally bigger”. Apparently, your hand and arm are not part of your body, and it is not within your normal range to be moving them. They should be fixed to the front of your torso at all times.
Hey, you there, throwing your arms up at the pedantic tone of this article. Stop that. Your arms should be in a permanent position firmly against your midriff. And you, holding that mobile phone out in front of you as you scroll… please withdraw your arm to its rightful place. To allow your hand to leave its resting spot in your pocket is ‘unnatural’.
Only this week we are being told we basically have to detach our arms completely. Thilo Kehrer tucked his hands in on Monday night as his West Ham United side attacked against Bournemouth at the London Stadium only to then be told by Gary O’Neil and countless whingers online that that is also an ‘unnatural’ position.
Kurt Zouma scored soon after Kehrer accidentally handled the ball as it headed for his stomach, and when video ref Mike Dean allowed the goal to stand, both the Bournemouth interim boss and the whole of Football Twitter threw their hands in the air. Hey, stop that. Do we need to put you in a straitjacket?
“[The referee] said Kehrer’s arm was in a natural position. I disagree. They’re both at his stomach and move to the ball,” claimed O’Neil to the BBC afterwards, completely ignoring the context of why players have now taken to tucking their hands in front of their torsos.
Later on Jordan Zemura slid in to block a right-wing cross and his raised arm got in the way of the ball. Penalty. Again, we are stopping just short of introducing pockets in players’ shirts from which they should never move their hands. When was the last time you made a slide anywhere with your arms never leaving your side?
This time, obviously, O’Neil deemed it a natural movement because, well, it was his player being penalised.
Football’s laws are not there to limit human responses, but that is exactly what they have become. And anyone demanding on Monday night that Kehrer’s or Zemura’s actions be penalised needs to take a long, hard look at themselves in the mirror.
This sport used to be about which of two sets of 11 players were better at football on a given night. Now we’re busy trying to retrain the brain so that people are second-guessing what they do with their hands. It’s like going on a date with a body language expert. Should I cross my arms? Elbows on the table is bad, isn’t it? If I put my hands to my face will they immediately leave and make me pay the bill?
It has to stop before we swallow the game whole. Give us back the law which allowed players to be human beings, with arms that sometimes leave a resting position without it being deemed an offence which cuts at the very soul of sportsmanship.
Oh, and West Ham beat Bournemouth 2-0. But apparently the result is now of secondary importance behind the normal resting position of Thilo Kehrer’s hands.
*18+ | BeGambleAware | Odds Subject to Change
