What are rules for?

Wolves 2 Arsenal 1

So I set my alarm for 2 am, woke up and could not get the game to stream live on Singtel TV Go on my phone. It could be that the free trial was over, but I wasn't sure. Anyway if ever there was an omen that I should not have stayed up for the game, this was it. I kept trying but to no avail and finally settled for the live commentary on the Arsenal app. This brought back memories of the good old days when I used to listen to the BBC World Service on the radio. Each week, they would focus on one game but would keep listeners updated on other games by switching over to those games when something significant had happened.

It's a whole different experience listening to a game because your reactions really are shaped by the commentator. You have no other context to compare it to, unlike on TV where you could have a very different interpretation of what happened. And this game, more than any other in recent memory, really highlighted how important perspectives are. Interpretation is the theme of this post, much like many of my recent posts about how people use wrong or dubious arguments (like those about evangelicals and Trump) because they are angry or are just biased.

Anyway, on the stroke of halftime, Luiz gets sent off because he was caught out of position, and tripped the attacker from behind, and this basically changed the game. There was a lot of anger from fans after the game about how it was not a penalty, or that it should not be a red card, or that it was a stupid rule - the idea that if an attempt is made to play the ball, it is a yellow, but if no attempt is made to play the ball, it should be a red card.

That point about the rule being absurd caught my attention partly because I am reading Law's Empire, which is really educational about how we should view and interpret the law. And prompted me to write this to Football365.

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Jeez Luiz...

No doubt there will be many arguments about this incident. Let’s get the easier one out of the way. Was it a penalty? Yes. I would be furious if we didn’t get one if that happened to us. Put aside whether we should have gotten one as well in this game. That’s relevant only from a consistency perspective.

There is some suggestion there was no contact. That’s highly unlikely. The attacker couldn’t be sure where Luiz was and to think he went down without contact when clear through on goal is bizarre. It’s not clear from the video but it doesn’t take a lot to bring down someone at full speed. Luiz stumbling after that suggests there was some contact. 

There is also the idea that even if there was contact, it was accidental and hence not a penalty. I think there is a way to accommodate this view, but only in extremely clear circumstances where no one could reasonably expect there was any intent. For instance, if another attacker pushes Luiz, who then brings down the player through on goal. The exemption should not apply when the defender could have avoided the contact (this distinction is I think quite key in the red card decision). Luiz was basically caught out, and decided to put himself in harm’s way. He could try not to run behind a player in a way that the other player’s foot does not (ahem) “accidentally” catch his knee.  Alright, maybe it was accidental and Luiz is just prone to these. (Cue Brando: “Women and children can afford to be careless, but not men”.) Accidental contact must be narrowly defined to only include actions that are totally out of the control of the offending player. The key question is whether Luiz had a choice. In my view, he did.

So penalty for me. Now, was it a red card?

The rule about the red card for not attempting to play the ball was designed to punish deliberate acts of cynical foul play. It is easily understood when the defender makes a rugby tackle for instance. There is a whole other debate about what constitutes a genuine attempt to play the ball. But Luiz clearly had no opportunity to play the ball and so the rule about it being a yellow if he tries to play the ball does not come into the picture at all. (There seems some merit in the argument about double jeopardy. Here though, we run into the often troublesome issue about the interpretation of fouls inside and outside of the box. Should a yellow be given just because a penalty has already been given? But I think this is a fallacy, because penalties are not certain goals and so it isn’t really double jeopardy in all cases.  Perhaps the solution then is that if the penalty is scored, the player is not sent off? Though this runs into the same problem of consistency of application. Should the player be sent off if the offence is outside the box, and the free-kick is scored?  What if a team decides to play the odds and deliberately miss the free kick or penalty if it was early in the game, or if the offender was the most influential player, or both?)

 Anyway it seems our discomfort is with the fact that Luiz might be innocent, that he didn’t mean to trip the attacker and so the red card seems very harsh. This is neither here nor there. If we believe it was accidental, there is no penalty and no red card. The rule is clear and we need only debate whether it was a penalty or not, and not whether it should be a red card. In my mind, the rule works well because it shapes behaviour for the betterment of the game. It places the onus for playing the right way on the players, as it should.

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