Come friendly bombs and fall on St George’s Park! It isn’t fit for humans now – the case for half-penalties.

Obviously, football, like all late-in-the-day bubbles, is ruined, and will soon burst, like the rotten, pus-filled, abscess that it is. What marks this event? Not the wave of ‘new fans’ who have ‘always, secretly loved the game’ – that phenomena merely marked the start of the last hockey-stick curve upwards in the money charts. No, the sure sign that football is in its endgame, is it’s lately-acquired status of mainstream respectability. And how do we know that? That’s easy; from the South-Sea bubble, to Game Stop and Crypto, ‘twas ever the same: the regulators have taken over – making it at once, a pursuit of repute, and in equal measure, joyless, whilst they strangle the life out of it, believing that they are making a good thing perfect.

VAR was the beginning of the ruination, but once deployed, instead of shaming its proponents and sponsors into withdrawing into the shadows, it seemed somehow to empower them. They now ‘owned’ significant equity in the way the game was played. And they stuck to their guns, and won their argument, on the usual, unmeritorious claim – the undoing of so many worthy enterprises, that, ‘We’ve come too far now – we’ve spent too much money already.’ Ask the Post Office about that, or Fujitsu, or the people who implemented the equally pathetic National Health Computer system, or the Benefits Processing Replacement Programme. And now, emboldened, they are proposing new changes which are as damaging and ill-thought through, as VAR. Blue cards for sin bins, is no more than a pedant’s charter.

Motivated by a total lack of respect for these men with double chins, who always cheat and always win, it is our pleasure today to propose the following rule change. On first hearing, it sounds ridiculous, as the gatekeeper’s to football’s inner sanctum, will always tell you. But it makes far more sense than any of the amendments and additions to rulebook, with which they have choked the golden goose.

And it is quite simply this: say there is a claim for a penalty. Not even that perhaps – an over vigilant administrator’s re-analysing of a marginal event in the game, raises the issue that there might be a technical issue of a penalty to be decided. Whatever. VAR analysis of the event commences. Here’s the proposed rule change. Any decision which results in the award of the penalty within thirty seconds of the VAR process starting, sees a normal penalty taken from the twelve-yard spot. However, if that decision takes longer than thirty seconds, the only outcomes can be, no penalty, or a half-penalty.

So, what is a half-penalty? The taker, who must always be the person fouled, stands on the centre-spot; the goalkeeper on the goal-line inside the posts; the ball is placed equidistant from both of them (it would be on a twenty-five-yard marker if pitches measured exactly a hundred yards). The referee blows the whistle, and the striker has a minute to score. The minute counts down in seconds on the stadium scoreboard, and a claxon sounds as it expires. If no goal has been scored, play resumes with a goal kick. If, before the minute expires, the ball goes dead, or it is safely in the goalie’s hands in his penalty area, the penalty is deemed missed.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=4uvi8B3IQyo%3Fsi%3DxTfQ6l7_N1TpaICr%26start%3D6

The point of all this? To reflect the fact that whoever it is that made the decision, is not certain that a clear and obvious error has been made; is not certain beyond reasonable doubt that it was a penalty; who thinks, on the balance of probabilities, that it was likely to be a penalty. So, they award a ‘lesser’ penalty. It’s not such a shock to the culture of sport to have two levels of punishment like this. We already have direct and indirect free-kicks, and everyone understands and accepts that without a problem. And as for two levels of penalty, hockey has always done it, and it’s an established part of their game, considered fair by all participants.

It should also achieve buy-in from the fans. A greater focus would be placed on the importance of making quick decisions – i.e. deciding that an obvious offence has been overlooked. We might even put the countdown clock on the VAR official, counting down the seconds that remain to make a real penalty decision.

And, perhaps most importantly, where half-penalties are awarded, it makes a virtue of what has become something ruinous to the enjoyment of the game. Ruinous, by the way, not in the sense that it takes ages, and brings to a crashing halt all the momentum and tension that has built in the game to that point of VAR intervention. No, as bad as that is; ruinous, in the sense that someone who has never even played a game of football on the street, the park, or village green, let alone professionally, has analysed for minutes on end, freeze-frame, and super slo-mo images, that give an entirely false impression of what happened in real-time – ultimately to make a decision that no person blessed of common sense, let alone an instinct for football, could ever make. Ruinous in the sense that the game, in all its important moments, has been taken over by book-learnt, plodding, computer assisted pedantry, that is the ONLY skill that these natural-born bureaucrats bring to the game.

The added tension and enjoyment of the moment that half-penalties might bring, will never compensate for the idiocy that has preceded it. But it might make a terrible situation slightly more tolerable than it currently is. And, perhaps, it might bring with it a collective notion that a step towards fairness, away from arbitrary, game-spoiling, decisions has been made.

And in that way, it might, perhaps, for a few more years, delay the return of football to the despised and marginalised game that it was not so very long ago, before young clerks had learned to add to the profits of the stinking cad. But only for a while.