There is a dash of old-school British midfielder in there but some of the worst unpunished fouls ever were inflicted on Liverpool and Arsenal only recently.
A familiar trope is the unpunished foul which absolutely proves that the referee is biased against your club and leads to 1,000 bedroom analysts creating videos of slowed-down footage to angrily prove look, they’re right. All this is usually in lieu of having an actual relationship with another human. The sort of behaviour civilians recognise as unstable.
Yet you have to say, the refs don’t get everything right. It’s like they’re human. Here are ten obvious fouls that were not obvious enough for the ref.
Jordan Pickford
England’s number one brutally assaults the fine-smelling Virgil van Dijk as he goes up for a header in the six-yard box. Jordan misses the flight of the ball, and it lands at the feet of the defender. There’s only one thing to be done: assault him in a clumsy collision, sending him sprawling into touch. It’s obviously a penalty but the ref is unmoved, preferring to disallow a goal for a player’s foreskin being offside after five minutes of replays. Yeah, offside is offside, poindexter.
Jose Bosingwa
Yossi Benayoun is protecting the ball in the corner to waste time with close attention from Didier Drogba. It’s very frustrating, right? So what do you do? If you’re Bosingwa you run up and stamp on the small of his back. Take that. Mike Riley, for it is he, waves play on, deeming it little more than a coming together which resulted in Benayoun’s spine hanging out.
Jan Vertonghen
It’s a midfield battle. West Ham’s respectable haircut Mark Noble is staggering around trying to get the ball, which comes to rest at Vertonghen’s feet. Instead of playing the ball, or indeed trying to play football at all, he opts to defend it by simply pushing Noble over, sending him sprawling. Not clever but effective. It’s an obvious foul to everyone except the referee who seems to think it’s a 50-50 challenge.
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Southampton
Bukayo Saka is cutting in from the right, in the way he does, moving at pace with a defender backing away. As he accelerates to go past him, the Southampton player makes no attempt to get the ball and out of hopelessness more than anything, swipes Saka’s legs away in a scything manoeuvre. You couldn’t think it’s anything other than a foul. 100%. There aren’t even other players around to confuse the ref who is confused anyway and waves it away as Saka has to collect his legs and put them in a bag to take them home.
Southampton again
In the same game, after kicking him without punishment, Southampton deduce that anything they do to Saka will be similarly unpunished. So when he’s running onto a ball on the edge of the area, someone just throws him to the ground like a bin bag on bin day when he doesn’t even have the ball. That is technically not allowed. Considering the minor offences you can get sent off for today, this was a human rights crime. But the referee was at home, enjoying the company of Mr. Total-Wassock.
Erling Haaland
The Premier League’s most vaguely ridiculous, clod-hopping, hopeless footballer but best goalscorer ever tries to play football against Crystal Palace. But unsurprisingly it didn’t go well. Having being programmed only to score goals but not to actually play the game, when the ball drops over his shoulder onto a Palace head, he awkwardly chooses to raise his phenomenally long telescopic robot leg above his shoulder and I think he aims to get the ball. He instead kicks Joachim Andersen in the head, yet the clumsy pub player-style challenge goes unpunished doubtless after the referee was bribed with his own oil field.
Ricardo Quaresma
In a game versus Uruguay, the Portuguese is running down the wing and has the beating of the defender who, knowing this, hacks him high up into the air. So high he actually bounces when he lands. Result? No foul, despite it being absolutely clear cut to everyone except the referee. This naturally enrages CR7, who looks personally insulted by the decision and he’s sure about that because he’s looking at himself on the big screen. He stomps around posing and doing his best to look like a very, very angry man who is staring into a mirror, but ends up looking like a very silly boy.
Guillermo Ochoa
We all know that keepers can get away with almost anything that everyone else gets punished for. Here’s the proof. In a Mexican league game a long ball is hoofed down the pitch for a striker to chase. It bounces once and the keeper collects it above his head, but the striker is running to contest it so, presumably to protect the ball, Ochoa raises his foot to head height and stamps with the flat of his foot into the face of the opposition player. Ouch, that’s gotta hurt. But don’t expect to get a free-kick. Goalies can do anything. Kiss my studs, baby.
Ron Harris
In a place far away, a long time ago, Chopper was playing for Chelsea against Stoke, but it could have been any club because he did it all the time. He’s behind a player – I think it’s Mike Pejic – hustling for the ball, at which point he rakes his right foot down his opponent’s right leg from back of the knee to ankle. It must have hurt like hell and Pejic goes down in agony. No-one complains, not even Pejic. This sort of brutal assault is all part of the game. Chopper just steps over him and collects the ball while the ref waves play on. Even allowing for more lenient times, it was a foul or possibly a war crime.
Graeme Souness
His reputation was well-earned and while it was made at Liverpool, it was at Middlesbrough where he learned his trade under Jack Charlton. In what would become a trademark move, done almost every week and classically seen about 14 years later for Rangers, Souey, playing in midfield against Leyton Orient, sees a loose ball and nothing will stop him collecting it – unfortunately for the Orient player who got to it first. He consequently received what can only be called a reducer: a two-footed lunge from behind which was more missile than midfielder. In fairness Graeme got the ball at the same time as the man so no foul, but nonetheless it was a vicious assault, the likes of which won Boro the Second Division a year later by a record points total. It went unpunished, of course. This was 52 years ago and you only got a yellow for surgically removing a leg without anaesthetic.
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