Don't Let The Hazard Footage Fool You Into Thinking Swansea Shouldn't Have Been Charged Too
While Chelsea's Hazard is going to face FA charges for being aggressive with a ballboy, no-one is talking about why the ballboy was instructed to timewaste at all costs
The moment Eden Hazard kicked that ball from under that cider swilling lout and occasional ballboy, you knew the lazy hack sports press were going to have a field day. The transfer window hasn’t really lived up to the billing that sees it advertised like the release of a Summer blockbuster movie all over Sky. The title run-in seems a foregone conclusion and not even the spate of cup upsets – each losing Premier League club’s managing coming under temporary scrutiny – can’t eclipse a good old fashioned “outrage”.
Having read reports of what happened that evening and the FA’s interpretation of events I have to wonder if we were indeed watching the same thing. What I saw was an overweight chav refuse to return the ball to a professional footballer, feign being pushed over, tuck the ball under his body in a bid to try and waste more time and then roll around on the floor after the ball was gently kicked out from under him. I had no issue with Hazard’s red card, nor a three match ban for violent conduct. He was naive, acted inappropriately and fell into a trap set by a cretin for an even bigger cretin. However, I was confident that when the facts were looked at there would be some action taken against Swansea, perhaps even a replay of the match. Instead what followed was vintage hysteria of its finest.
“Disgraceful” seemed to be the word of the day, almost exclusively aimed at Hazard. The papers reported it in such a way you would believe that the player had delivered a UFC style kick to the head of an eight year old. In reality the ball “boy” was 17 years old, Hazard had just turned 22. At age 17 Hazard was taking bigger knocks in the French league on a regular basis, vulnerable or not. While there can be no excuse for losing your cool on the field of play, it seems that certain English players get a pass and of course if you happen to play for anyone but Chelsea you can be certain the press won’t be quite as vicious.
“When will Chelsea rise from the gutter?” asked the Daily Mail who were keen to somehow link this incident to John Terry’s use of racist language, Obi Mikel accusing a referee of being racist to him and numerous other unrelated issues. Radio pundits squawked about how it was “always” Chelsea, some even electing to imply that the club was somehow institutionally racist and probably practiced human sacrifice wherever possible. After all, that’s what Eden Hazard had tried to do, right? Murder an innocent with his pointy foot.
In the clamour to crucify a young talented footballer in his debut season in England, the media have of course glossed over more than a few facts. Perhaps the first is that Hazard, as dangerous as his name might well make him sound, made no contact with the ball boy himself. There is clear footage of this shown from the reverse angle, a piece of footage that mysteriously seems to be subject to copyright claims where the far more incriminating angle is allowed to remain in the public domain. If any contact made was so slight that it would have to be measured on a molecular level for us to be sure it had happened.
This might seem a minor detail but it’s not really when you think about it. Hazard is facing a ban beyond that of violent conduct, likely to be somewhere in the region of eight games. People have made lazy comparisons to the Cantona kick, a clear assault on another individual that originally saw the Frenchman sentenced to two weeks in prison before that was overturned. Given that no contact was made and the only thing to indicate there might have been the theatrics of was the theatrics of someone who clearly had an agenda, one that he made no attempt to mask from the general public or the FA.
There is no doubt the ball-boy simulated having an injury, which is perhaps the most sad testament to the state of the modern game that can be made. Or the second saddest when you take into consideration that the ball-boy in question was all over Twitter boasting about his prowess at wasting time. Maybe I’m missing something but if a member of staff working at a football ground, the son of the club’s largest individual shareholder, is publicly admitting to attempting to subvert a result, isn’t there a much bigger issue here than a simple matter of frustration boiling over, something that happens on the football pitch and in every sport each and every weekend?
The few who raised this point seem to have been shouted down, or rather those shouting about the pervading evil of Chelsea were just shouting much, much louder. Those who addressed it said that it was part and parcel of playing at away grounds, that you could expect that sort of behaviour. That may be true but here we have someone related to someone with a direct financial interest in the results of the football club in question being allowed to influence a result. This has to result in some form of action from the FA or the message they are sending out that it is OK to use a series of dirty tricks to try and hamper your opponents progress when they play at your ground.
Where would it end? Hiding the physiotherapists equipment so he can’t treat injuries? Laxatives in the half time drinks? Sharpening studs? I mean, in a time the FA is savvy enough to prevent footballers from betting on matches because of how it could be abused, why are they incapable of seeing that the people that should be making a difference home and away are the fans and no-one else associated with the game.
To put it into perspective the FA actually reprimanded Stoke for having a special towel-vest worn by Ryan Shotton so he could dry the ball quickly for his long throw-ins. They deemed then that towels should be available for both teams and it was therefore not in the spirit of the game. Is it in the spirit of the game then to allow a club to instruct its ballboys to waste time, to encourage them to refuse to hand over the ball to a professional player chasing a result in a cup tie with a place in the final at stake? Swansea have answered a resounding “yes” to this question by refusing to take action against the ball boy. Of course Chelsea have to discipline their staff member in private but making sure the fact they are doing so is made very public. This won’t sate the FA.
If it is indeed as innocuous as Swansea would have you believe then you’d have to wonder why the Welsh FA wasted no time in banning the ball boy from their international against Austria. ‘God no, he can’t be one of them!’ said the FAW representative according the club secretary of Morgan’s youth team. He also didn’t seem to understand why it was an issue.
An 8 match ban would be a travesty and there are no grounds on which to sanction such an action. No-one would argue about rescinding the red card but the three match ban for violent conduct is more than sufficient. After all, that is the ban he would get if he had performed the same action to a player and they would legitimately be trying to influence the result within their means.
The reality is that whatever we say about Hazard it was an honest mistake, a moment of poor judgement that will be punished. What we shouldn’t tolerate is the far more important issue of teams trying to illegally stack odds in their favour for home games by any means they can. Somehow though I expect Swansea and the Morgans will walk away Scot-free from something that, in any other league, would be called out for having more than a faint whiff of corruption to it.