Arsenal are right to seek protection for Bukayo Saka
Bukayo Saka gets kicked. A lot. Arsenal supporters frequently ask for him to get more protection but he’ll get none without a lowering of the bar for red cards.
Regular readers will have noticed that I like to supplement this newsletter with a picture. It’s just something I knock together. Sometimes it’s a bit silly and sometimes it’s just a bit of colour to break up the wall of words.
There’s nothing clever about it. I’m certainly not making a vain attempt at funny Photoshops like some hilarious old bantersaurus trying to meme to get a cheap laugh from the young team.
You’ve got BBC Sport for that.
We paid for that! Sake.
Anyway…
Arsenal are right to seek protection for Bukayo Saka
No Premier League player has produced more carries ending in a key pass or a chance created this season than Bukayo Saka of Arsenal. Only a handful have been fouled more, and Gunners manager Mikel Arteta knows as well as anyone that these two facts are linked.
Teams, says Arteta, want to stop Saka. After most weekends the Premier League post-mortem includes an examination of the tackles Arsenal’s opponents have deployed in order to do so. Calls for protection mount.
Saka is regularly subjected to robust treatment because he’s an energetic, creative and talented player who’s likely to inflict damage on his opposition. Along with his youth, these are the supporting arguments in favour of cutting Saka some slack.
But they don’t justify specific protection for Saka or any other young, exciting player. Saka doesn’t deserve to be cocooned by referees because he’s 21, or good, or fast, or skillful, or Bukayo Saka. Footballers are equal under the laws.
Referees have in their own arsenal the nuclear deterrent. That’s what Arsenal supporters and others are referring to when they talk about their more dynamic players needing protection.
They want players sent off for the challenges they make on the likes of Saka because of who they are and how they play, but the laws of the game already offer that protection to every footballer.
The current laws define serious foul play – a red card offence – as follows:
“A tackle or challenge that endangers the safety of an opponent or uses excessive force or brutality must be sanctioned as serious foul play. Any player who lunges at an opponent in challenging for the ball from the front, from the side or from behind using one or both legs, with excessive force or endangers the safety of an opponent is guilty of serious foul play.”
That’s it – serious foul play in 2022/23, unedited and unabridged.
Concepts like endangering the safety of an opponent and use of excessive force are fascinating because they’re subjective. When pundits use terms like “reckless” to justify a red card decision, they’re talking shite. Usually, they mean the challenge in question meets the red card threshold and don’t realise that “reckless” does not.
But there’s a word of objectivity buried within this particular law: must. And it’s lack of adherence to must that leaves players – all players – vulnerable to serious foul play.
Demands that players are better protected bring to light a curious discrepancy in modern football discourse. The consensus seems to be that tackling is now dead or dying or outlawed, yet the red card is something to be managed despite the laws making clear that serious foul play must result in dismissal.
While I don’t have much sympathy for the idea that tackling has been “banned”, it’s plain to see that the bar for foul play of the mundane sort is pathetically low. It shows in the general run of the game as well as consistently absurd penalty awards.
At the other extreme, though, the bar remains steadfast. Saka can win a foul by taking a tap on the heel and going to ground, but the standard required to result in a red card puts him and every one of his peers at risk of injury twice a week.
My point? It’s too difficult to get a red card and I don’t care one jot that referees have to balance their responsibility to apply the laws of the game with the need to manage it. It’s tempting, in this supposed post-tackling climate, to revel in thumping yellow card fouls. The reluctance to upgrade them is the last remaining scrap of football law that favours the tackler.
It’s an inconvenient truth – for those who’d prefer to laugh at Arsenal and Arteta, as well as advocates of the contact sport we’ve apparently lost (we haven’t) – that there are examples of serious foul play that go under-punished or unpunished in most football matches. So, do we want to protect players like Saka, and indeed unlike Saka, or not?
Saka won’t play in the EFL for at least a dozen years, if ever, and it’s probably for the best. In one day in the Championship we saw three serious foul play incidents of note.
In Birmingham City’s home loss against Luton Town, Blues defender Marc Roberts cleaned out Hatters scorer Carlton Morris. Birmingham manager John Eustace said it was an excellent tackle. It wasn’t. It was abysmal.
It is as clear an example of serious foul play as you could hope to see. Referee David Webb is in a good position. Therefore Roberts must be dismissed. No wonder Luton were annoyed.
Reading’s Amadou Mbengue was yellow carded by John Brooks for another challenge that was, to my mind (and I accept this portion of the decision is indeed subjective) serious foul play. Jordan Thorniley of Blackpool probably agrees, having been on the painful receiving end. Mbengue himself was similarly hard done by a week earlier against Cardiff City.
And, for the sake of completeness, Preston North End finished their win over Wigan Athletic with ten men after the stoppage-time sending off of Robbie Brady. His was the result of a second yellow card when a straight red for serious foul play might have been more appropriate.
If tackling is dead, if football has become a non-contact sport, how do we explain these decisions? Like Webb, Brooks was well-positioned. His assistant was right on top of the Mbengue foul too.
The Championship doesn’t have Video Assistant Referees (VAR) but let’s not pretend that’s to its detriment, or that it's a hindrance to the referees in question.
Officials both present and remote are good enough to see and smart enough to know when serious foul play is committed. The relatively low number of red cards compared to red-worthy incidents is not a technical fault but a cultural one.
Lots of supporters don’t care. I can understand that; not wanting lots more red cards is an entirely logical and justifiable point of view.
But as long as we’re happy to keep that bar high, Saka is going to get kicked up in the air every Saturday afternoon. We can’t have it both ways.
“For the first time, a new independent regulator for the men’s elite game will be established in law to oversee the financial sustainability of the game and put fans back at the heart of how football is run.
“The regulator will implement a new licensing system from the top flight down to the National League, requiring clubs to demonstrate sound financial business models and good corporate governance as part of an application process before being allowed to compete.”
The long-awaited and offensively overdue independent football regulator is on the way. It was a key recommendation of the Fan-Led Review of Football Governance in 2021 and will leave a few well deserved casualties in its wake.
Salty beef extracts
There should be a law about treating fans better… and it turns out there is (The Football Fan)
The psychology behind England's history-making mentality (BBC Sport)
European Super League: zombie entity creeps back into football’s new landscape (The Guardian)
Is MLS truly a major league in the US? It depends where you are(The Guardian)
Goal of the Week
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