Injury bins

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There is a coming-together on the pitch, perhaps two players rising to contest a high ball or a player on the run being dispossessed by a sliding challenge. One, whose team are leading, stays down. He appears to be in pain. The physio is beckoned on and kneels over his man to administer treatment. After a while the ailing player is helped to his feet and is led, limping gingerly and wincing in apparent agony, from the field. But it is as if an invisible, all-healing forcefield rings the pitch, because the moment he hobbles across the white line he spins and demands to return to the fray. The referee waves him on and he sprints back to his position, suddenly in rude health. Attempting to deceive the referee by feigning injury is a bookable offence, for unsporting behaviour, but in these circumstances it is absolutely never punished, and not only does this tactic steal chunks of action from almost every match it often interrupts the flow, divesting teams of momentum. It is, in short, cheating, and annoying. Unless officials can properly enforce the law concerning unsporting behaviour, even retrospectively, another option is required. So how about giving each stricken player 60 seconds to get on with play, after which – unless they are bleeding, in which case they are already forced off the pitch for as long as it takes to stem the flow – they are obliged to leave the field for a period of no less than five minutes. You never know, the idea of placing your team at a numerical advantage might prove to have surprising restorative powers.

Close of play hooters

To aid the tension and uncertainty that surrounds stoppage time, I offer a simple proposition, borrowed from rugby league: as soon as the referee believes that sufficient additional time has been played at the end of each half, an aggressively loud hooter is sounded. From that point, play continues indefinitely until the ball goes out of play (fouls conceded by the team not in possession don’t count – you can’t just kick someone to end a match), at which point the half/game is over. This is probably only a very marginal improvement on the status quo, and many matches would end with nothing more dramatic than the player in possession when the hooter sounds immediately blootering the ball into row Z, but in certain close-fought games I believe it would add a pleasing bonus period of total chaos.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Would a hooter have prevented Chelsea’s players remonstrating with Lee Mason after he blew the whistle before they could take a corner. Photograph: Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty Images

Action against begging fans

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An unpleasant recent novelty has been a rise in the number of young fans going to games with signs beseeching a particular player to give them his shirt. Why do you want a dirty shirt? It’s just another thing in a world full of things. If you go home and try to tidy your bedroom, you’ll find you’ve already got more than enough things. And dirty shirts aren’t even good things. Creating a shirt-begging sign suggests an expectation that a free shirt might be the result; from that moment if he or she does get the shirt the moment will have been stripped of innocence and spontaneity, and if they end the day empty-handed they will be disappointed. I’m not suggesting players shouldn’t give away their shirts, however dirty and useless they are. The point is, and this is something I believe very strongly, children who go to matches with signs asking for things are precisely the children who should not be given things.