As all but the most tribal fruitcases would agree, Arsenal\u2019s Declan Rice is an island of decency in the rather foetid river that is modern football. But even he seemed to be performing the Heimlich manoeuvre on a West Ham forward in the grapple-fest that was the epic 95th-minute corner last weekend. Like everyone else, Rice joined the all-in wrestling, bullying, grabbing, judo throw-downs and fouling that have disfigured so many of the corners we have seen this season and made these moments such a dreadful spectacle. As at an orgy, it is hard to see who is doing what to whom.<\/p>\n
After an eternity, the referee judged that West Ham\u2019s Pedro had his arm across the Arsenal goalkeeper David Raya\u2019s throat and disallowed the West Ham equaliser. Should the goal have stood? Well, it would have been an injustice: not as big an injustice as the Bafta TV Comedy award going to Amandaland rather than Big Boys, but an injustice nonetheless. The difficulty for the referee and some poor old guy at the VAR console is that any number of fouls could have been taken into account. Which came first \u2013 Arsenal\u2019s bad behaviour or Pedro\u2019s semi-assault on Raya?<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s go back to year zero and work out how to make corner kicks work properly<\/p>\n
You have to admit these boys at PGMOL, the clunkily named officials\u2019 organisation, have an exquisite taste in irony. Arsenal have made these set pieces their speciality. You wonder if VAR might like belatedly to review all the (27) times this season when Arsenal have scored from corners while fouling everyone in sight and VAR didn\u2019t intervene.<\/p>\n
Corners have become like a rugby scrum, though without the very careful discipline and innumerable penalties. Maybe football should take a lesson out of the rugby manual and treat them like such: \u2018crouch, bind, set\u2026\u2019 and so on, and then the mayhem would be properly policed. It beats me why a ref hasn\u2019t already handed out a shedload of yellow cards and the occasional red. Let\u2019s go back to year zero and work out how to make corner kicks work properly. Admittedly it would probably take an eternity; Ars\u00e8ne Wenger has been looking to clarify the offside rule for years with little to show for it. Do you only allow players into the six-yard box once the kick has been taken? And how do you achieve anything without increasing dreadful layers of officialdom?<\/p>\n
The key moment came 12 minutes before the end of the game, when David Raya near-miraculously blocked from a few yards a shot by West Ham\u2019s Portugal international Matias Fernandez. Raya was the most influential player on the pitch. He won Arsenal the game, and almost certainly the Premier League title as well. He has won the golden gloves award for best keeper three years in a row. He has 18 clean sheets in the PL this season, but was overlooked again for the football writers\u2019 Footballer of the Year title. Only four keepers have ever won the awards: Gordon Banks (1972), Pat Jennings (1973) and Neville Southall (1985) in the modern era; and the legendary City keeper Bert Trautmann, who won the award in 1956, the year he broke his neck and played on in the FA Cup Final. The goalkeeper\u2019s job is harder than ever now, as they get constantly mauled from corners. Give them a break, and a gong.<\/p>\n
Not since Gary Sobers flayed Malcolm Nash for six sixes in an over in Swansea in August 1968 has an individual performance caused such a froth of excitement in a county cricket match in Wales as 18-year-old Tom Norton\u2019s hat-trick against Somerset last weekend. The strapping young medium-pacer from Abergavenny was playing for Glamorgan and it was Boys\u2019 Own stuff: the first time since 1906 a debutant took three in three balls \u2013 and against the team who had been the county championship\u2019s early season pacemakers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As all but the most tribal fruitcases would agree, Arsenal\u2019s Declan Rice is an island of decency in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":671468,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[563],"tags":[3361,64,63,596,588,85],"class_list":["post-671467","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-football","tag-arsenal","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-football","tag-sport","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/671467","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=671467"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/671467\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/671468"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=671467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=671467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=671467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}