Another player has a broken leg, another violent reckless challenge has gone unpunished by the referee. Meanwhile the FA stand by watching and absolutely sod all about it. We have already lost several Premiership players to broken bones this season as a direct result of overly aggressive and dangerous tackling, not to mention the number who have been put out for a few weeks with nasty sprains and bruising.
De Jong is the culprit this time and it isn't the first time for him. He won the ball with one leg, however this is irrelevant as the fact is that the tackle was reckless for two key reasons. Firstly if one has to scissor the player with the non tackling leg with the follow through then it is a foul, irrelevant of whether the first leg won the ball. Secondly the amount of force that De Jong used was excessive and endangered his opponent's safety. For these reasons the tackle was serious foul play and should have resulted in a red card.
The problem is that a lot of muppets in the media and around the game do not understand the basics of tackling. The BBC joked about Ben Arfa's misfortune, while Chris Waddle on ESPN seemed to think that there was nothing wrong De Jong's reckless and violent challenge. We have a major problem in this country and it badly needs addressing, players legs will continue to shatter in a quite needless manner until the FA decide to get off their lazy spoilt behinds and do something proactive about this violent cancer in the game.
