Hard cases make bad law even in football

Suarez proves he's a worldclass keeper

Suarez’s Hand of God lite has once again put the refereing and rules of football in the spotlight. This time the referee made the correct decision to send off Suarez for his handball but was it Asamoah Gyan who twatted the penalty, which meant Ghana didn’t win the regular game but lost in penalties. Our sense of fair play is outraged by this, that somebody can blatantly cheat and get punished for it yet still get his team in the semi-finals. Together with several other high profile incidents like England’s disallowed equaliser against Germany which sent them out of the Worldcup there’s been somewhat of a clamour for changes in the rules, you may have noticed.

First there was the call on FIFA to finally introduce proper goal line technology and television replays, after that disallowed England goal and an Argentine goal against Mexico that was blatantly offside but not spotted by the refs, both on the same day. In both cases the goals were turning points in the game and if not for the decision they could’ve taken a different turn. Had there been goalline detectors to show the ball had crossed the line in the first case, or had video replays been officially available to the refs in the second, these injustices would’ve been prevented.

With Suarez, the outrage is focused not on the decision, but on the sanctions. Somehow after Uruguay went on to win their game on penalties, having Suarez sent off and a penalty awarded just did not seem enough. Various pundits, fans and interested bystanders instead would’ve liked to have seen not a penalty, but a goal awarded in situations like this. That way we would be certain cheaters aren’t rewarded.

These calls are understandable, but misguided. Lawyers have a saying: hard cases make bad law and that goes for football as well. Handballs are a dime a dozen, but situations like we saw in Uruguay-Ghana game are incredibly rare. In more normal situations, where a handball might have prevented a goal but the game is far from over anyway, to punish a team with a goal and a sending off is too harsh — a penalty will suffice and is usually succesful anyway. Guaranteed goals also go against the spirit of football in which only actually scored goals count and which doesn’t deal with goals that should have been scored. That’s part of the charm and frustration of football.

The need for more technology I sort of share, but I can also understand why people other than Sepp Blatter disagree with that. Again, the two examples above are so rare and so blatant it’s not that likely they will be repeated often. In fact, technology wasn’t actually needed in either of them, just referees which weren’t halfblind and looking the other way.. For more ordinary, less obvious situations the question is how to integrate this sort of technology in the flow of the game. It’s easy to use video playback to retroactively disallow a goal, but if a referee has disallowed a goal and the game goes on, how do you go from there? Would we really want to make football into a more static game, ala rugby or American football, where coaches can challenge decisions on the field?

Did Luis Suarez cheat?

Yes, yes he did. But hang on, Dave Brockington disagrees:

No. He did the rational thing. It was perhaps not the sporting, moral, or ethical choice, and definitely the cynical choice, but given the nature of the match, he made the correct decision.

If he doesn’t act, the ball goes in, and Uruguay are out. Plain and simple. If he acts, there’s a small chance that he does not get spotted by the referee (again, see USA v Germany 2002). If he does get spotted and correctly sent off, there’s a chance that Ghana miss the penalty. The odds of both of those events occurring in that order are slim, but as luck would have it, did indeed occur. Suarez didn’t cheat, he operated within the rules of the game. Odds are Ghana would have converted the penalty, and we wouldn’t be discussing this. However, they didn’t, and continued to miss a couple more during the shootout.

In the ensuing 100+ comment thread a lot of people agree with Dave, making the comparison with basketball, where apparantly it’s accepted practise when you’re losing to start fouling a few minutes from time to break your opponent’s streak. You make the foul, you take the punishment if caught, it’s all in the rules and you’re not a cheater.

It’s the same sort of logic used by speeders everywhere. A co-worker of mine just the other day explained he was more than happy to pay the occasional fine for the priviledge of being home sooner, all part of the system and no great crime. The same again goes for tax cheats, who’d argue that fiddling the tax man is the rational thing to do and if you’re caught, pay the fines and fiddle again next year. And of course it turned out the entire financial system was populated by people who thought that the rules did not apply to them…

This sort of supposedly rational tradeoffs — where punishment is seen purely as the potential cost of a transaction rather than as a sanction — hollows out systems. If actions like Suarez’s last night are seen as understandable, even laudable or the right thing to do in the circumstances, this means more people will attempt it, rather than playing within the spirit of the game. Doing the convenient thing rather than the right thing might be endemic in basketball, but I don’t want to see it happen in football — or at least not more than it already has. What Suarez did was cheating, he didn’t make a rational tradeoff but got punished for breaking the rules and hopefully Holland will kick Uruguay out of the tournament next Tuesday…

Two-One

Oranje celebrates the win over Brazil

Bloody hell.

Is the Dutch team out to kill off half the Netherlands through a heart attack? A lousy first half, the Brazilians scored, another huge chance was fortunately saved by the keeper, once again keeping Holland in the game, all Dutch attacks stranded in the Brazilian defensive wall, it looked hopeless. I thought we were out of the game.

But then the second half… We came back on the field with the same team and I knew that we were doomed. But then… A great equaliser, an equally great second goal, the Brazilians one man down and Oranje looked and played so much better. Credit where credit is due, Brazil kept threatening and there were times when it did look like they would equalise. Luckily, they didn’t and we’re through to the half finals…

Maradonna supports the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo

The Argentine football team supports the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo at the worldcup

As you should know Bob, during the Argentinian dictatorship of the seventies and early eighties, the Argentine military waged a dirty war against its own people, disappearing thousands of trade unionists, activists, socialists and other leftists and all other sorts of socalled subversives. Most of the disappered were first tortured then killed, were often young, in their tens, twenties or thirties, sometimes had children of their own who also disappered, being adopted by the very same people who tortured and murdered their parents. And it was not just leftists who got disappeared: ask too many questions and you would be tortured and murdered as well. But some of the mothers of disappeared people refused to be intimidated and kept asking the government where their children were and when they got no answers, they started a silent protest on the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, keeping up throughout the dictatorship even though several of the original mothers were disappeared in turn. They did not stop when the dictatorship ended, but kept up demanding answers, keeping up their weekly protest until 2006, when finally a government was elected that wasn’t interested in continuing the coverup. In later years, as the truth did start to come out the mothers also campaigned for the truth about the children of the disappeared, those adopted by their killers.

It’s not surprising then that the Argentine football team chose to honour these women at the start of the Worldcup, by calling for them to win the Nobel Prize for Peace. If any groups deserve it, they are. What is surprising is how little attention this gesture got in the mainstream meda. I myself only read about this today, on Inveresk Street Ingrate. You would think this should’ve gotten more coverage, as such a political statement is not exactly common amongst footballers. The Worldcup itself after all is tainted by having been held in Argentine at the height of the dictatorship, in 1978. Perhaps this is why it was slipped by almost unnoticed?