"It is unfortunate, especially since he does not need to do it. The funny thing is that the referee did not even show a yellow card for it. I have a problem with the way Nigel needlessly looks to push the limit. I am going to speak to him."
MOTD seemed to ignore the incident completely last night, just as the completely incompetent Martin Atkinson had done earlier even when it had broken a leg right in front of his very eyes. We should remember poor Ben Arfa in all this, this is a potentially career ending injury, get well soon Hatem.
If Dick knew English football better he would not find it funny that no card was shown, the lack of understanding of overly aggressive and dangerous tackling in this country means that these kind of leg breakers are routinely missed by incompetent referees. The FA also have their head so deep in the sand that they refuse to act retrospectively even though they have the power to do so.
The Spanish authorities have recently given a player a two match ban for a tackle on Lionel Messi, a tackle that was seen and punished by the referee at the time. In fact retrospective bans for violent incidents that were seen by referees are happening rather routinely on the continent, is is just a terrible shame that the FA do not even recognise there is a problem and continue to refuse to act.
The same old tired defences of the player who committed the appalling tackle come out, he's 'not that type of player', it wasn't 'malicious', 'it's a man's game'. None of these cut the mustard, reckless violent tackling with an excessive amount of force has no place in our game, it is indefensible, these kind of tackles are malicious by their very definition. Tackling is perfectly possible in a very safe manner without endangering the safety of one's opponent, people who cannot understand this are nothing but fools. Tackling like this was never part of football, it seems to me that the art of proper tackling is being lost, and defending the indefensible is no way to bring proper tackling back.
