Man City and Arsenal Count the Cost of Football's Lack of Common Sense

For 36 minutes, it seemed as though the unconquerable dynasty of Pep Guardiola was under threat. Yaya Sanogo had the world’s best goalkeeper scrambling, Mesut Ozil had Jerome Boateng floundering and the seemingly unflappable Bayern Munich suddenly looked beatable.

Hapless penalty attempts aside, Arsenal’s all-action start at the Emirates gave English football fans real hope of silencing the Bundesliga bandwagon. But then English football fell victim to a rule as outdated as FIFA President Sepp Blatter’s tenure in office. 

Wojciech Szezcsny’s rash challenge on Arjen Robben provided an ugly ending to a beautifully carved through ball by Bayern’s instrumental Toni Kroos. A penalty? Undoubtedly. But a sending off and the effective ending of the tie as a contest? Not the script any football fan had hoped for.

And this is where FIFA has once again failed to adapt quickly enough to the changing face of the modern game. Common sense is a quality that seems far too absent in the corridors of power in world football. Fans, players and pundits led the protests for goal-line technology for years. By the time a decision had been made, Frank Lampard’s equaliser in Bloemfontein had already been written out of history. Now, after Manchester City and Arsenal’s last-man dismissals, English football's Champions League hopes are likely to be condemned to the same fate.

The news is that FIFA will meet in March to confirm that the ‘triple punishment’ of a sending off for last-man challenges will be removed from the laws of the game. But why has it taken this long? Any right-minded football fan will tell you that a penalty and the very real chance of a goal is a punishment that fits the clumsy crimes of Wojciech Szezcsny and Manchester City’s lumbering Martin Demichelis.

Demichelis given his marching orders 

 

The debate over the severity of the laws on professional fouls is not a new phenomenon, but one that has raged on for season after season. The reactionary approach of football’s governing bodies not only does a disservice to the players but it deprives the fans. English football’s showdown with the Guardiola prototypes of past and present should have been played out over two titanic Champions League ties. Instead, football fans are left wondering what might have been.

Changes to the laws of the game, for the good of the game, should have been made seasons ago. But that would be the practical thing to do. Football never did like doing things the easy way. We can only hope that March’s meeting in a lavish hotel somewhere in Switzerland brings an immediate resolution to one of football’s prehistoric problems.

The players of Manchester City and Arsenal deserve credit. They fought valiantly to contain the behemoths of Barcelona and Bayern Munich. But with 10 against 11, a simulation of a training game of defence against attack played out on English soil was the only likely outcome.

The neutral can take solace from the fact that Bayern and Barcelona's away goals brings the prospect of an ‘el passico’ one step closer. However, March and the possibility of a long awaited change to the rulebook cannot come soon enough.