English Football League / Dan Fitch / 28 October 2008 /

Dan Fitch looks at the "dark side" of the game that includes time-wasting and standing in the wall when your own team is taking a free-kick. It's not right but it's ok when your own boys are doing it.

They say that rules are meant to be broken, but those that are clever choose to merely bend them, allowing the rule to spring back into place, as good as new.

These people skulk around within the grey areas of the law. Their activities may not be strictly above board on a moral basis, but they figure that as long as they stay within the parameters of the actual law, they'll take their chances with the big man upstairs on judgement day.

It takes some creativity to look at a rule book and work out ways in which it can be exploited. The laws of association football are particularly ripe for manipulation. In every game you watch, you'll see several incidents which can't be classified as foul play, but remain somewhat shady.

Football has always been a working man's game, as opposed to those gentleman's sports of cricket and rugby. As such, football has always been looked down upon as the misbehaving oik of the British sporting world, despite the fact that rugby players spend half their time punching each other and cricketers like nothing better than to make comments regarding the sexual activities of the batsman's mother.

Footballers have always played up to this tag, employing any form of gamesmanship that would allow them to gain an advantage. No football supporter likes to see such antics, until that is the 89th minute of a match against your deadliest rivals, whereupon the murky depths are immediately preferred to the moral high ground.

The rules of football are constantly adapting to stamp out such mischief. I know that many people only joined the football bandwagon, post SKY, the Premier League and the existence of DJ Spoony as an expert in the field. But let me take you back to the dark ages. A time when football players were allowed to pass the ball back to the goalkeeper.

Come five minutes to go and 2-1 up, most teams would spend the remainder of the match passing the ball between centre backs and then back to the goalkeeper. The keeper would pick it up and make like he was considering giving it a big punt upfield, but would instead just roll it out to the centre back and the charade would begin again, generally to the backdrop of much whistling and booing.

The pass back was outlawed, but teams still found ways of wasting time to kill off a match. The willing accomplice to the pass back rule was always the last minute substitution, which was guaranteed to waste a good 30 seconds of play. Now that teams can make three substitutions per game, it's even more routine, but unlike the pass back rule it's difficult to stamp out. Whilst you could bring in a law prohibiting sides from making a substitution after say, the 80th minute, this would punish teams that were unfortunate enough to pick up an injury within this period.

Another good way to wind down the clock is to dribble the ball towards the corner flag and to then just stand there, or the old I'm going to pretend that I'm going to take this throw in, but really at the last minute I'll make out that I've decided to defer the responsibility to our full back, who will amble across to take it at the pace of a snail routine. Extra marks are of course given to said full back if he takes the throw a good five yards further up the pitch than he should of.

Sunderland's Pascal Chimbonda is making a habit of late of getting up close and personal with the opposition's wall, whenever his team get a free kick. This backfired slightly in their recent game against Fulham, when not only was Kieran Richardson's converted free kick ruled out for pushing in the wall, but Chimbonda also suffered the indignity of being sexually assaulted by Jimmy Bullard.

Against Newcastle at the weekend though, Chimbonda's unsettling presence in the wall worked a treat, unsighting Shay Given to allow Richardson to wallop in his free kick. Sunderland, who cannot afford to get all high and mighty in regards to how they achieve a result are now a distant [16.0] to be relegated.

As Whitney Houston once sang "It's not right, but it's OK". We might not like some of the gamesmanship that goes on, but we tolerate it, probably on the grounds that if it were us on the field, we'd do exactly the same. Well, all apart from the sexually assaulting Pascal Chimbonda bit.

'.$sign_up['title'].'

'; } } ?>

:

:

:

?

: