The fascinating dialogue between Roy Keane and Patrick Vieira, repeated on ITV1 last night, contained one especially haunting thought. Keane was “amazed’’ no Arsenal player chopped down Ryan Giggs as, profiting from Vieira’s error, he ran on to score the glorious FA Cup goal that set Manchester United up for their Treble in 1999.
Keane didn’t exactly say it should have been done but he was articulating a view prevalent in the game and almost accepted as a player’s duty. Hence the hideous phrase “taking one for the team”. We hear it constantly and, for me, it has been the only negative factor in an otherwise delightful season.
Even Gary McAllister, whom you’d associate only with creativity, hailed a “good foul” at the weekend. A slightly more acceptable description is “tactical fouling” and Arsene Wenger complained about it after Everton had drawn at the Emirates. But Arsenal once benefited from Gilberto Silva, one of the cleverest tactical foulers of the Premier League era, so no one is on moral high ground.
And it’s anything but an English disease; Michael Ballack became a national hero for upending a Korean who threatened to prevent Germany from proceeding to the World Cup final in 2002, which Ballack duly missed through suspension. If such offenders are “taking one for the team”, the punishment doesn’t fit the crime. South Korea should have gained advantage from Ballack’s foul, not Brazil, who won the final comfortably.
The question of what should be done about it in an ideal world (one in which Sepp Blatter and I swap jobs once a year so that I, rather than he, tell the International Board what to do at their March meeting) is more complicated. The sin-bin idea is flawed — the depleted team can sit solid while the offender rests for 10 minutes — but the more that phrase resounds the more attractive it becomes.
