da fazobetai： Well it was a clear penalty, wasn’t it? After all, he raised his hands, and that’s asking for trouble. By the letter of the law, the referee had no option. He had his hands out. It clearly struck his arm. He can have no complaints. I’ve seen them given. It brushed the elbow. You can’t do that in the penalty area.
da dobrowin： Seriously, does anyone actually know the rules of the game for awarding penalties for hand ball? I’ll be damned if I do anymore. Is there any other rule in football whose written form is so consistently ignored? I always thought the rule was hand to ball, not ball to hand?
So what does the relevant law (12) state?
“…a direct free kick (or penalty) is awarded to the opposing team if a player…handles the ball deliberately”.
The problem is that the written rule is not really fit for purpose. The fact is, very few handballs are deliberate. If we were to truly interpret the hand ball rule by the letter of the law you’d hardly ever see a penalty given for hand ball. I reckon, using no evidence and just a few random thoughts floating round my head, that at least 90% of hand balls are not deliberate.
So clearly referees are being instructed to interpret the rule differently – and from reading far too much of the internet every day, it also seems widely acknowledged with football fans that it’s not to do with a deliberate act either.
There have been meetings about this before, resulting in advice being handed out to referees across the continent. Take the infamous (bear with me) UEFA Referees conference in 2004, which asked officials to consider the following points:
Was it a hand to ball situation or ball to hand?
Are the player’s hands or arm in a ‘natural’ position?
Should the player take the consequences of having his hand or arms lifted high?
Does the player try to avoid the ball striking his hand?
Is the player able to avoid the ball striking his hand?
Does he use his hand or arm to intentionally touch the ball?
In Fifa’s Laws of the Game 2005, the document fails to describe what constitutes deliberate handball, which places the responsibility firmly on the referee and referees’ assistants.
So as we all know, this rule isn’t always applied as written. When the ball strikes a hand or an arm which is well away from the body and all the stadium can see it, the referee will invariably give a free-kick/penalty whether it was deliberate or not – that, as we can see from above, is what they have been advised.
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Former Premier League referee David Elleray has previously reiterated the point that the referee’s interpretation depends on whether the hand or arm is in an “unnatural” position at the point of contact. “Referees look at two specifics – did the hand or arm go towards the ball or in a manner which would block the ball, or is the hand in a position where it would not normally be? The challenging decisions are if the defending player spreads their arms to make themselves bigger. If the ball hits the arm then the referee must decide whether this action was to deliberately block the ball or whether the player has raised their arms to protect themselves – especially if the ball is hit at speed.”
Graham Poll once said the same in in a column: “If a player deliberately makes himself big by raising his arms then he can have little argument if he is penalised when the ball is stopped by that unnaturally positioned arm.”
Though to be fair, this is a man that thinks a red card is handed out after three yellow cards.
Nowadays if the ball strikes a player within a foot of his arms or hands we are subjected to cries of “handball!” from the baying crowd. Games are turning into little more than pantomimes, with the defenders playing the villains. And whilst I am fairly happy with the advice that referees have been given on the matter, I have seen many a penalty given for a ball hitting an arm/hand by the side of the body (hardly unnatural now is it?) or when the arms/hands are in an unnatural position due to simply protecting themselves from harm.
Where the ball would have gone without the intervention of the arm/hand is of course important. Because of the way handball is interpreted, I could certainly have no complaints about the penalty awarded against Joleon Lescott when Manchester City lost to Chelsea. However, take the Ivanovic handball in the Chelsea v Wigan match. I seem to be the only person on the planet (apart from the match referee) who thinks that it was not a penalty. His hand was in front of his chest, so the ball would have hit him anyway. Yes the ball was hit from some distance away, but we are still talking about a mere half a second or so from shot to hand, and there was certainly no deliberate act involved, more an impulse action to protect himself, done awkwardly.
Nor was Micah Richard’s versus Arsenal a penalty for that matter – a ball he didn’t see coming, from a cross that deflected on its way to him – games should not change on such trifling matters.
My personal opinion? I think there needs to be change. Goals should be earned. Penalties should be due to serious offences. Let’s drop this hysterical overreaction to a ball accidentally hitting someone’s arms or hands. A penalty is a big deal – it effectively gives a team a high probability of a goal. I don’t think we should be deciding games because of this obsession over a ball striking a certain part of the body. I just hope referees can ignore the howls of the crowd and remember the advice they received. In the same way that contact with another player in the penalty area is not automatically a penalty, contact with a hand isn’t either – I think too many penalties are being given, too many games shaped by innocuous events. Sometimes it really is a lottery.
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