Morning all, welcome to a brand new week. The Diego Costa stuff will rumble on, with Arsene Wenger backing suggestions that the Chelsea striker should face retrospective punishment for his antics on Saturday.
Asked if he felt the FA should view video and dole out a ban after the fact, the Arsenal manager concurred, and reiterated his criticism of referee Mike Dean:
Yes, of course. They do it for everybody. I would like them, especially I would like Mike Dean to look at the whole action that happened during the game and see if he stands for his decision. They can tell you and they know Diego Costa. He is not a newcomer. He was here for a year now.
I tell you something, if I am a referee and I referee Diego Costa, I do not send somebody off quickly if he responds to it because you know he has been well provoked.
There’s definitely room for it though. From watching the incidents again, I think Costa is booked for his coming together with Gabriel more than what happened with Koscielny. Let’s ignore the fact that the assistant somehow missed the Chelsea man with his hands in the face and the slap and all the rest – if Dean hasn’t seen what went down previous to that, then there’s got to be room for further action to be taken.
A new angle of the red card incident came to light yesterday, and as well as highlighting how soft it is, it raises further questions of how the decision was made. If Dean saw it himself, as some are claiming, why did he need to go and consult one of his assistants? After Costa starts bleating like the enormous crybaby he is, the referee moves away, talks into his mic, and then makes the decision to send Gabriel off.
Surely a referee who had seen what had happened and deemed it worthy of a red card would have made that decision straight away. And if he did need confirmation about what had happened, did the assistant have any clear view of it? Here’s the moment Gabriel flicks his foot up:
I doubt the man on the far side of the pitch, with players in his way, saw anything at all. The players are too close together, there are other players in his way and it happened so quickly it’d be astonishing if that’s where the information came from. Yet Dean wasn’t sufficiently convinced by what he saw himself, if he saw anything at all, to make the decision autonomously.
Anyway, we’ll find out soon enough what’s in the referee’s report and whether or not Costa faces any post-match action. The idea that he might escape with just a yellow card after everything he did is injust, by any measure. It’s up to the FA to protect the integrity of the game over that of their officials, so let’s wait and see what happens before making any further comment.
It’s also worth mentioning again how video evidence in a case like this would actually help referees, rather than undermine them. Some fear the authority of the officials would be compromised by use of technology, that mistakes and human error are part of the fabric of the game. There’s some truth to that, of course, but I bet referees would rather be right as often as possible rather than protected by ‘tradition’ or because that’s the way things have always been.
Rules change all the time, it’s hard to keep up with what’s offside these days, for example. Officials now have mics and earpieces and buzzing flags. Every ground has cameras that capture things from every angle (as we see from the clip above), and we now have goal-line technology implemented without it doing anything to take away from the authority of the referees. The longer people keep making excuses about why we shouldn’t use technology more, the further football gets left behind.
Of course there are discussions to be had about how and when it should be used, especially for the duration of the game itself, but until those start in earnest we won’t make any genuine progress, and it will further enable those who choose to behave like Costa did. As Goodplaya puts it:
The only people who benefit from the refusal to use video evidence are the cheats.
Amen. Nonetheless, while Arsene Wenger has rightly rounded on Dean and Costa, he’s also reminded his players that they have to rise above and not take the bait when it’s so obviously dangled in front of them.
I don’t understand Gabriel because he usually looks a calm boy. You have to be above that. That’s part of the game. To be professional, to me, is to deal with that. The desire to win has to be above all of that. You stand up to it in a controlled way. We are equipped to respond, but we always have to keep control of our response.
Ideally, yes. Look at Laurent Koscielny for example, he knew what Costa was up to and refused allow himself to be wound up. Some players are just more emotional on the pitch though, and clearly Gabriel saw red in more ways than one. For him it’s a shame because he’d had a good run of games, and seemed to be settling in well alongside Koscielny, now he’ll miss the next three matches.
And despite how much of an injustice it is that Costa went unpunished during the 90 minutes, there’s still a feeling that it was a red card we could easily have avoided. There’s no assurance that with 11 men we’d have got something from the game, but it felt pretty even and I don’t think we were under huge pressure. It’s something the Brazilian will learn from, I’m sure, but it’s a situation to look back on with some regret overall.
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Right, that’s about that for this Monday. James and I will be here with an Arsecast Extra for you later today. If you have questions or topics for discussion, please send to @gunnerblog and @arseblog with the hashtag #arsecastextra.
That should be available for you around lunchtime, so until then.
