Question Number: 19231

Other 5/30/2008

RE: Recreational and Competative Under 19

Doug Anderson of Orillia, Ontario Canada asks...

This question is a follow up to question 18796

I have found the clip referred to earlier [in 18796].

http://www.metacafe.com/watch/777905/example_of_fair_play/

Funny and informative

DSA

Answer provided by Referee Richard Dawson

It was a comedy and uplifing at the sametime. One has to laugh the keeper although allowing the second equalizing goal did not seem to want to assist by keeping the ball in play.

Here is another for you

http://www.1000goals.com/nottingham-forest-vs-leicester-highlights

Other high level incident includes the FA match between Leicester City versus Nottingham Forest. A goal adrift when the initial meeting was abandoned because Clive Clarke, the Leicester defender, suffered a heart attack during the half-time interval, Leicester stood aside and allowed Paul Smith, the Forest goalkeeper, to amble from the halfway line, exchange high-fives with Marton Fulop, his opposite number, and prod home to restore the advantage.

The idea came from Milan Mandaric, the Leicester owner, Megson and Tim Davies, the club?s managing director, after Forest?s response to events in the ill-fated first meeting. ?It was a gift from everyone at Leicester City for the way Forest behaved in the first game,? Mandaric said. ?We wanted to show that morality and fair play are not dead in the game.?

Next

LONDON: A soccer match is annulled, and will be replayed next week, though no sporting law was broken. How can that be right? There is good reason. It is called fair play or, from a half-forgotten era, the Corinthian spirit.

The English are Corinthians again, so all's fair with the world I hear you sigh. However, though the setting was one of England's oldest playing fields, the principles were mostly from other countries.

Feb 13 1999 FA Cup match between Arsenal and Sheffield United in London was locked at 1-1 when a Sheffield player went down injured in the Arsenal penalty box. He was obviously in distress, and a Sheffield colleague kicked the ball out of play to allow him medical attention.

When play resumed, Ray Parlour of Arsenal attempted to honor the convention that applies throughout the world by tossing the ball to the opponent.

Unfortunately, Nwankwo Kanu, a Nigerian making his Arsenal debut, intercepted it and passed the ball to his Dutch teammate Marc Overmars who scored with hardly a Sheffield man making the effort to prevent him.

Sheffield United stood like sight-seers at a road crash while their goal was breached, and reacted liked robbed innocents. Maybe in the modern game, where sport caves in to winner-takes-all business, they were naive to stand aside under the presumption of fair play.

Referee Peter Jones felt he had no power to overrule the goal. Actually, the arbiter did have a choice. He could have deemed Kanu guilty of unsporting behavior (FIFA disciplinary Rule 12) and cautioned him with a yellow card. That would have assumed the Nigerian was fully aware of what led to the throw-in, and Kanu swears he was not. The player made a mistake, and Overmars kicked the ball into the net without considering the justice of the moment.

(Actually the referee could not have found the player quilty of usb unless he had decieved the referee intentionally.) He could have seen a foul throw in as in not from the correct spot. ;o)

Jones believed them. It was a high pressure, televised match, unlike a lower division English league game between Wrexham and Preston last month where another arbiter disallowed a goal in similar circumstances. On that occasion, the referee applied common sense; the higher you climb in officialdom these days, the more this discretion ? in effect to bend the rules ? is exorcised rather than exercised.

((I tried to find a bout this and failed but I have misgivings as to what passes for common sense. ;o( ))

The International Football Board, which ratifies the rules, meets in Britain this weekend but is unlikely to consider the simple option of enshrining in law the practice that FIFA has successfully urged on players to give the ball back after an opponent needs urgent treatment. There would, claims FIFA, be a book thicker than a London telephone directory if every possibility was written in the laws.

So the onus shifted from a referee who followed the thin rule book and felt powerless to intervene, to the team which gained an unsporting victory.

"We feel it is not right," said Arsene Wenger, the Frenchman who coaches Arsenal. "We feel that we didn't win the game like we want to win our games. The best we can do now is to offer Sheffield United to replay the match."

A FOREIGNER in England's national sport offering the English a reprise of the Corinthianism that they invented along with the original rules of the game?

It appears Wenger had discussed with his board and an FA official at the game, le beau geste. Moreover, from English soccer officialdom, renowned for moving with elephantine slowness, there came within the hour a heartfelt acceptance.

Cynics rushed in. This, they said, would be a deadly precedent, would encourage the cheats to push for any loophole and seek endless causes to have their defeats overturned.

Doubtless some will try. But David Davies, the acting chief executive of England's Football Association, cleverly offered the high ground to FIFA, the rulers of world soccer. "We are members of FIFA," said Davies, "and their slogan is Fair Play. We wanted to show everybody that fair play matters in this country."

Touch?. The ball was in FIFA's court and sure enough Sepp Blatter, the president of FIFA, kept it in play by responding: "It was a wonderful gesture. Both Arsenal and the FA behaved in the best spirit of the game, and FIFA applauds this unique gesture."

So, a full-blooded replay at Arsenal's London stadium takes place Tuesday. The 38,000 fans will be admitted for half the normal price, and even the players accept that to labor twice for the same end is better than to have won or lost unjustly.

"The decent thing has been done," said Martin Keown who is the Arsenal spokesman for the players' union. "It shows the true spirit of the game, it is without ulterior motive, and is an uplifting decision in a season besmirched by players feigning fouls and attempting to fake penalties."

I reprinted this as the conclusion presented above does in fact generate an overall feeling that things need to change and have been stalled too long.
Cheers