Joshua3

Excerpt from Martin Samuel:

‘It wasn’t a bad tackle’ is the standard line, isn’t it? On the sofa, in the studio, in the press box, from the phone-ins. ‘It didn’t look that bad. There wasn’t much intent. He’s not that kind of player. He was just too quick for him. I thought the ref had a good game, actually. He let it flow.’ This last phrase - and we have all used it - translates as letting the players operate on the absolute boundaries of what is legal; a standing leg on this side of the divide, a raised foot on the other.”

“The reaction to the Shawcross and Taylor tackles is telling. Alan Hansen, Alan Shearer and Gary Lineker were stoic over what Shawcross had done, reviewing the footage on Match of the Day. Similarly, at the time of the Taylor tackle on Eduardo, Steve Bruce, a respected central defender, now manager of Sunderland and his former boss at Birmingham, did not even see the challenge as a yellow card.”

“From season to season, the justifications are unaltered. More than three decades’ experience in English football at least made Kemp smart enough to predict that the challenge on Jeffers was not the last leg-breaking tackle in which Shawcross would be involved. And he is one of the good guys, apparently.”

There, in a nutshell, is the problem.