Source: Daily_Mail
Des Kelly: It's time to tackle the real thugs and put them before a proper jury
The game is dizzyingly fast, referees are incapable of keeping up, the disciplinary process is downright feeble and footballers cannot trust one another. Combine all those factors and you have the perfect conditions for a career-ending tackle.
Which is why the sneaky studs-up stamp and the wild, uncontrolled lunges have continued to feature again this season despite the empty promises about a crackdown.
Only luck and the occasional miracle of modern medical science have prevented a string of early testimonials. And Arsenal
manager Arsene Wenger is absolutely right to call for harsher punishment.
The solutions are straightforward and simple to introduce but, before we come to that, let us clear something up. The game is still nothing like it was in the 1970s. It might sound vaguely controversial to argue we have slipped back into the brutality of that age, but equating today's high-speed ballet to the vicious conflicts of 40 years ago is like comparing ballroom dancing to cage fighting.
Ex-referee Graham Poll argued on these pages yesterday that West Ham's ugly win at Wigan was 'a throwback to the '70s all it needed was Ron 'Chopper' Harris and Norman 'Bites Yer Legs'Hunter and the tear-up would have been complete'.
I could hear Harris and Hunter choking on their cornflakes from here. First, both were essentially 'enforcers', players whose sole purpose in life was to eradicate the threat of a more skilful rival. As a football species, they are practically extinct today.
They were undoubtedly masters of their dark art, but both would have been sent off following their first touch which was usually to dispatch a nippy winger over the advertising hoardings. Anyone with any experience of football before satellite dishes and PlayStation 3 should know that.
Harris and Hunter could actually tackle, however. When they wanted to collect the ball, they did so. It is a skill that has all but disappeared from today's Premier League, as Wenger rightly pointed out.
This is because football is practically a non-contact sport today. It's part pinball, part basketball, part five-a-side, with many of the finest players spending more time honing their acting skills than learning how to tackle.
It is in this climate of artful deceit and constant cheating, where every trick in the book is employed to con a referee, that an official finds himself disbelieving the blur of evidence before his eyes.
When two individuals collide, the referee has maybe half a second to decide if it was a dive, a trip, or a disgusting assault. The only thing he can be certain of is that gesticulating players will surround him and an angry crowd will bay for his blood. Some over-react and some crumble and lose control, as Stuart 'Babyref' Attwell did at Wigan.
But it's the players' fault. They did this to themselves. They complain they are not protected and yet constantly employ the morals of a thief to cheat their way to any advantage.
Cristiano Ronaldo is a perfect case in point. I watch him being kicked by opponents in every match and I see referees wave away perfectly deserved free-kicks time and time again. But he expends so much energy falling over and overdramatising contact on other occasions it's no surprise officials cannot unravel real from fake.
Looking back at the grotesque lunges of Kevin Nolan and Lee Cattermole, Wenger said: 'If you tackled anybody in the street like that, you go to jail.' The trouble is, footballers genuinely believe they are above the law.
The cure? For starters, managers could begin by dealing with the violence in their teams. How many bosses do you hear complaining about a perceived injustice, while shrugging off the bad behaviour of their own dressing room? If managers want a cleaner game, they can begin by dealing with their own dirt.
Secondly, it's time to bring players to account before a proper jury. The Football Association should adopt the perfectly sensible system employed in rugby union where players can be cited for offences missed or incorrectly dealt with on the pitch.
Managers lodge an official protest, an independent panel reviews all the evidence regardless of whether the referee has shown a card or not and they then dole out punishment accordingly. Players don't receive a statutory rulebook ban of three games for a violent offence, they can be looking at weeks and months on the sidelines if it is appropriate. A second offence might equate to a season's ban and a third can result in someone being told to clear their locker.
It works in other sports, it can work in football.
I'd say that might clean things up rather quickly, wouldn't you?
Silly me. I had Dwain Chambers all wrong. It seems these days he is and I'm quoting directly from one national newspaper here 'a hero of his sport'. Let's give him another medal, shall we? One to go alongside the 60m gold he is expected to collect this weekend at the European Indoor Championships wearing a British vest.
Like me, you probably had him down as a returning drug cheat trying to spread the blame around for the years he systematically pumped his body full of performance- enhancing drugs, while making a few bob in the process by flogging his story.
But it seems we were wrong. He is in fact a victim of the system; 'a poor black boy' his own words taken in by those around him.
One of his new media allies even believes he deserves our 'gratitude' and should be 'admired for his candour' because he is selling, sorry telling us about his crimes. Chambers does indeed lay out his history of drug use in all its grisly detail, reminding us constantly he is 'being honest' as he does so.
But he is just being candid, which is very different to being honest.
Every story is skewed to paint him as the scapegoat, the man who couldn't fight the system. Take the story of Chambers' decision to take drugs.
Naturally, he was the unwitting fall guy who succumbed to the patter of a figure wearing glasses and holding a brown paper bag of drugs. We're meant to believe he didn't go all the way to the west coast of America to train in pursuit of this very approach.
Chambers also insists he didn't know whether the concoctions he was taking were illegal or not, which is a risible claim.
And when the FBI raided his supplier's laboratory, he says this was at the moment he had 'sworn to myself that I was coming off the drugs'.
Now isn't that an extraordinary coincidence?
'I'm the world's worst liar,' he adds. But Dwain really shouldn't put himself down. He's much better than that. Chambers now complains he is being 'denied his basic human rights to feed his family' because promoters cannot forget his past.
Yet why should he get an easy ride back into athletics? Life is not an Etch-A-Sketch. You can't just get up one morning, erase your history and start again. In many professions, the consequences of previous mistakes or crimes haunt the offender long after they have 'done their time'.
Besides, who's to say Chambers isn't in some way benefiting today from the physiological changes his body underwent when he was jacking up on anything he was offered? Athletics is indeed in denial about the extent of the drug abuse in its midst. The sport continues to have corrosive problems and is beset with contradictions, but Chambers is part of the disease, not part of the remedy.
And if people are trying to make him out to be a standard bearer for a new age, then it really is time for everyone to pack up and go home.
Stonewall job for Pakistan?Amid the carnage of the murderous Lahore terrorist attack, the security mess and the subsequent finger-pointing, two facts leapt out.
Interesting fact No 1: Javed Miandad, the Pakistani legend, now director general of the Pakistan Cricket Board, is related by marriage to one of the most wanted men in the world. His son married the daughter of Dawood Ibrahim, who is described by the United States as 'a global terrorist who maintains close links with al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden'.
Ibrahim is also accused of being implicated in the Mumbai attacks and remains the head of an extensive organised crime syndicate involved in cricket match-fixing scandals.
Interesting fact No 2: On the first two days of the Test match between Pakistan and Sri Lanka, the team coaches left at the same time and travelled to the match together under escort.
However, on the third day, when the fateful attack occurred, the Pakistani bus left five minutes after the Sri Lankan coach. ICC match referee Chris Broad, caught up in the machine-gun assault on the Sri Lanka squad, said: 'After this happened you think, 'My God, did someone know something and hold the Pakistan bus back?''
Good question. The Pakistan authorities say they are waiting for the results of two internal inquiries before jumping to conclusions. But the chief executive of the Pakistan Cricket Board has already announced that Broad's account is 'fabricated'. So it sounds like they know what conclusion they'll get.
Whenever you hear FIFA president Sepp Blatter harping on about his ideas to reform world football, just remember that back in the 1970s he was elected president of the World Society of Friends of Suspenders.
This was an organisation formed to 'protest at women replacing suspender belts with pantyhose'.
It's all you need to know about him really. He's like a 1970s sitcom.
Embarrassingly dated.
