To the victors the spoils...

Why the Premier League and referees should be worried about their reputation and need to take action

I’M NOT really a Tottenham Hotspur fan, even though I was first taken to White Hart Lane as an awe-struck boy in his impressionable years by an uncle who lived just off Lordship Lane and with whom I’d spend a couple of weeks in the summer holidays. No, my club was Non-League, my home town of Weymouth. It actually helped in my 40-plus years as a football writer, I believe, as I had no allegiance to any of the big clubs whom I’d cover regularly for my various newspapers.

Since my backwards step from journalism, if not writing, however, I have come to enjoy going to Spurs with my son, having purchased two ridiculously expensive season tickets for us. He most definitely is a fan, which is my fault. Living in St Albans, the gravitation for kids who fell for the game was towards North London and Arsenal or Tottenham. Arsenal were always the more successful and most of his mates supported them. But, I told him, Arsenal buy defenders and Tottenham buy strikers; they’re more fun. It was, after all, during what would prove then to be the final, defensive, days of George Graham. He duly chose Spurs. Arsène Wenger arrived a year later.

Now the lad is stuck with Spurs and on days like yesterday, when they lost 2-1 at home to previously winless Ipswich Town, I regret my steering him towards Tottenham. Thankfully he doesn’t blame me and, being a sound lad who has life and its wider significances in perspective, he accepts that condition called Spursy, which means being predictable in their unpredictability and of losing from winning positions. Of defying odds heavily stacked in their favour.

And it doesn’t come much more Spursy than yesterday. The pre-game shows pointed out that were they to beat a club occupying a relegation place going into the match, were Newcastle to beat Nottingham Forest and Chelsea and Arsenal draw, then Tottenham would rise to third in the Premier League table. The second and third of those two things actually came to pass. The first obviously did not. Odds heavily stacked in their favour defied once again.

Now, I do want Spurs to win for my son. It gives me pleasure seeing him happy. But the real pleasure for me amid the splendour of the new White Hart Lane is spending the day with him (which makes those season ticket prices value in my eyes). Of having a meal together and discussing our lives in particular and life in general. That and seeing a good, entertaining game in which a home team true to their attacking heritage will play their part. Thankfully they have a manager who understands this and though Ange Postecoglou can sometimes seem weighed down Eeyore-like, eyes staring at the floor in interviews, he does encourage and empower Tigger football.

I mention my semi-neutrality to explain that what follows is not sour grapes but the misgivings of someone, and something of a purist, who is concerned at the direction of travel of the Premier League currently and which needs addressing if the competition is not to squander its reputation as the world’s most entertaining and competitive league.

Yesterday I/we did not see a good, entertaining game. Tired after a midweek trip to Turkey, Tottenham’s foibles and failings were significant in that yes, but it was more due to Ipswich Town’s cloying approach. From the enlightened club and silky teams of Bobby Robson, of Arnold Mühren and Frans Thijssen, it saddened me. Especially as it came on the watch of the one of the English game’s most promising young manager in Keiran McKenna.

It began very soon into the game, with the expert spoiling tactics of Town’s 6ft 6in Swiss-born Kosovan international Arijanet Muric. Now, people seem baffled as to why a team would waste time so early in a game but it is less to do with using up the clock – at that point, anyway - and more to do with breaking the rhythm of a side like Tottenham who rely on tempo and momentum. Muric would take an age over a goalkick, both in retrieving the ball and then deciding whether to kick long or short. At one farcical point, he ran 15 yards forward ostensibly to berate a team mate for not closing down a shot before revealing the subtext by ambling back to get the ball. At another, he kicked the ball away but made sure it stayed within the playing area so that the ball monitor, not allowed to encroach, was unable to throw him another one, meaning that Muric had to retrieve it. It was painful to endure.

Then we had the slowing midfield foul – which all are guilty of, including Tottenham, and needs to be punished with a yellow card sooner in the game to instil the fear of a second - and the tactical injury, designed again to halt opposition momentum but also to engineer a ‘time-out’. It is maddeningly frustrating for spectators to see an ‘injured’ player leap up and run around after a couple of minutes of treatment, during which his team-mates can gather around the manager on the sideline for instruction and respite, while the opposition seethe with frustration. It comes either in mid-half or at moments of greatest pressure on them. Quite often, the goalkeeper again will be the culprit. Postecoglou, disdainful of the tactic and wanting his own players to think for themselves, appears to eschew it. Alongside all this, the eternal dragging out of throw-ins seems minor.

Now Ipswich are by no means the worst – or should that be the best – at what these days seem to be called ‘dark arts’. (Back in the day, that was reserved for sly defenders who got away with off-the-ball acts of violence before the game clamped down.) Aston Villa, under Unai Emery, are well educated in the modern less physical but no less devious versions, Eddie Howe’s Newcastle United too. The two goalkeepers there, Emi Martinez and Nick Pope respectively, are also the key figures in their approach when fearful or under siege – and it was just possible to hear on TV Liverpool fans’ annoyance at Martinez’s delaying tactics on Saturday night, even if it did go largely unmentioned in commentary.

What was galling was watching the Match of the Day highlights of the Spurs v Ipswich game and nothing being discussed about this anti-football approach that is sometimes lauded as – another dreadful modern vogue phrase – ‘game management’. Ipswich , quite rightly, were applauded for their win – and I do not forget they scored one sensational and one scrambled goal courtesy of Spurs’ soft centre - but pundits have a duty to point out tactics too. Neither do highlights capture the tedium of it all for the paying customer in the stadium. That’s because they are, of course, edited highlights and as such inherently skewed versions of real events.

Even more galling is the failure of referees to do anything about any of this. Yesterday’s at Tottenham, Darren England, merely watched on with fingers metaphorically in ears as Muric went through his slow-motions. England is not alone, though. The six-second rule of goalkeepers retaining the ball is no longer enforced. The yellow card for delay of game is rarely enforced and if it is, it is only late in a game so that the referee has not put himself in a position where he might – with all the unwelcome scrutiny it would bring - have to issue a second yellow and thus a red.

We did get signs at the last World Cup that FIFA would be cracking down on time-wasting with unexpectedly long periods of added time. After initially being applied in domestic leagues as a result, in England at least it has largely been forgotten. Yesterday there were eight minutes added, when there were two long injury breaks and all the other delays of game, that should have totalled a minimum of 10. It would have been good for the game in general if Tottenham could have scored in the extended period but they just weren’t good enough, and Ipswich too good at shutting it down.

If referees feel they don’t have a mandate to act – or are just oblivious to it – then first the PGMOL, the Premier League refereeing body, should instruct their members to be stricter. If they won’t, football’s governing bodies need to look again at legislating to force them to. In the first instance, they could take a lead from the futsal indoor form of the game which hands possession over to the opposition if too long is taken over the restart of a game. There could, for example, be 15 seconds to take a throw-in and 30 seconds to take a goalkick. If not, then it becomes a corner to the attacking team.

And while on that subject, the time taken before a restart after a goal has become ludicrous with ever more excessive celebrations. He meant it to be funny but Andy Hamilton, in his book Blue Was The Colour (full disclosure: I commissioned it) suggests if the celebrations go on longer than 30 seconds, then the other team should be allowed to kick off anyway. Now that would be worth watching.

In all seriousness (actually, that last paragraph was semi-serious), with the referee having so much on his plate these days, most notably with the added burden of VAR, then the responsibility for the match clock should be taken away from him. I’m not for stopping the clock every time the ball goes out of play - players need natural breaks and we have enough pressures on their bodies and injuries incurred through too many top-level games as it is - but I am for someone in the stands policing potential new timing rules about goalkicks and throw-ins. Goodness knows, the Premier League and PGMOL can afford it.

Of course, time-wasting, fouls and delaying games has gone on since time immemorial. The game in the 1970s was frequently compelling but also often cynical, dour and austere. And anyone who has ever played the game will know that in the heat of battle, defending a narrow lead, it’s only natural to take your time or, for those of us who barely graduated from Sunday league, to belt the only match ball into the undergrowth 50 yards away.

Much of this modern stuff and guff feels very calculated, however, almost coached. And the attitude and approach seems to begin almost from the first whistle. We have to acknowledge the validity of running down a clock with skill, by keeping possession, but not through what amounts to cheating. If it’s your team, of course, the argument will go, then needs must where the devil drives, desperation amongst players and managers growing with the financial stakes these days. And how else might little Ipswich beat the big boys in this environment, especially away from home? They’re not there to entertain the home support, after all. Well – different times I know – Bobby Robson’s versions found a way.

I’ll keep going to Spurs, of course, because of my son and my days with him but the club that has shamefully withdrawn concessions from senior supporters should not count on it if they can’t use the money from the extortionate prices they charge to finance the purchase of more ingenious players capable of overcoming spoiling sides. Neither should the Premier League count on us forking out for increasing numbers of TV subscriptions if games are going to be so cynically conducted amid a silence by those TV companies who pay for it and thus have a vested interest in promoting it. We may love this game but I wouldn’t base your business plans on us forever being mugs.