Is it time to punish teams that cripple with financial penalties?
By Graham McNorthbank
There's not really much to say about the challenge that will see Aaron Ramsey in the treatment room for the majority of 2010. The BBC did well on Saturday night to freeze frame the moment of impact and while it did not look malicious, that is immaterial given the damage it did.
But beause footballers - even teenage ones - can be on such massive wages these days, I'd like to sound you all out on a proposed solution that might work both on a domestic and international level - compensation.
Being Arsenal fans we all know about Robin van Persie getting injured season after season while on international duty for Holland. So why not introduce a culture where clubs are compensated for the financial loss of paying a player who is on £3-4 million a year while he isn't available for selection.
It's often the case that the player who is injured as the result of a foul is the victim of a far less talented - and therefore lower earning player. That patently was the case for Ramsey on Saturday. So to suggest that the opposition player should pay simply does not work.
My solution would be that Stoke should then have to pay Ramsey's wages until he is fit for selection again.
That sort of policy would have clubs thinking twice about sending their players out on hatchet jobs. It could also be insured against and would mean that the teams who consistently try to kick their opponents off the park would have to pay the highest premiums.
And of course, the most talented players in the game would be better protected, especially if clubs could pass on some of the financial burden to the guilty players by way of fines. I wonder if Tony Pulis would have been so quick to condemn Arsene Wenger's view of Ryan Shawcross if Stoke then had to pay Ramsey's wages and medical fees for the forseeable future?!
The bottom line with Ramsey is that Arsenal now have a player who in all reality we won't see featuring for the firstteam until 2011. But at the same time the club has to pay the young man's wages, tying up funds that could be used to bring in a replacement.
A culture where the culpable club - be that Stoke or Holland or even Arsenal if one of our players inflicted such an injury on an opponent - would be obliged to pay for a player's full rehabilitation could effectively clean up the game and make moments such as the one that crippled Ramsey on Saturday or Eduardo two years ago, a thing of the past.
It goes without saying that us Addicts wish Aaron Ramsey a full and speedy recovery, but having seen the way that such incidents can disrupt a team's prospects, it would be good to hear some feedback from you Gooners - and indeed fans of other clubs - about a solution that could bring such career threatening challenges to an end. Surely the time for such discussions is now rather than waiting for others to suffer similar injuries...
GM
Reader Comments (10)
For once, Graham Poll spoke a lot of sense on the Ramsey incident. He said that none of these leg breaking tackles are true accidents. I agree. I played football as a defender and when you make a tackle, you can always, at any moment soften your leg i.e. relax your muscles, so that there is some springiness in the impact ( unless you have launched yourself off the ground and can only land full-weight on your opponent). If you do that, you may bruise your opponent but rarely break a bone. The sheer impact of Shawcross's collision showed that he made no attempt to restrict the damage. It is no surprise that he broke Jeffers's ankle and did Adebayor's achilles in recent seasons.
One thing that almost makes me feel as sick as the original incident, is that arrival on Monday of the likes of Collymore and Cascarino, painting Shawcross as the injured party (he shouldn't have been given a red card! - even Pulis acknowledged that it was a very bad tackle!) and laying into Wenger for criticising a culture which finds that kind of thing acceptable.
Great to see the FA take a stand by awarding Shawcross a place in the England squad, shortly after the Ramsey incident! It says it all, really. England and the FA are still in the dark ages.
I was thinking the same thing that the "offending" team contribute to the rehabilitation of the injured party, though FA cup games may throw a spanner in the works with minor league teams never having the finances to cover these costs, so a little more thought is needed, but a good suggestion. Being a regular TalkSport listener, I look forward to the tripe that Collymore will come out with, and he has also started in his newspaper article. The man hates Arsenal and everything it stands for, so I'll be just laughing at his (Northern) English bias when he tries, with his limited intelligence, to criticise Wenger, Fabregas or anyone who commented on the "tackle", but hey his lack of education, is always highlighted by the noise that he makes by shouting down anyone who argues against him. It will make amusing listening. Get well soon Aaron. Come back stronger and better.
IN addition to financial penalties to the club as suggested above, I think it would also work as a deterrent if the player inflicting such a tackle is suspended for 10 - 15 consecutive games. This would mean at least such a player misses like a half of the games the victim is expected to miss during his recovery period.
In the first place, it would diminish the International scene. Many Associations dont have , and I'm including our association in this who continually shell out on overseas based players (sorry my lil rant) so burdening them with costs for injuries would see many associations go to the wall. As regards the issue of culpability, was shawcross sent out on a hatchett job? i doubt it. Where you could hit teams would be payments from the Premiership/domestic league, based on red/yellow/fouls committed throughout the year and divy their funds out to those high up on the fair play league.
Well i think Aaron should receive some financial compensation.
Im sure he will come back and be a top player but however good he does become in the future, you can always argue this injury will have set him back and prevent him from being even better.
Anyway, the people responsible for this are the refs. The press egg on this behaviour but if the ref had been in control of the stoke match this wouldnt have happened. He encouraged this culture of just flying in with tackles when you arent 100% sure of getting the ball by not calling fouls consistently. It's like he was saying "get up" in that football-fan manner pretty often when our players were actually getting fouled. This sends the message that the stoke players are right to run into the back of our players or whatever and it snowballed from there.On top of that he missed 2 blatant pen calls before the injury. You could see the guilt in his face after ramsey went off. It was only then that he started calling fouls properly.
I’m happy with the mature response of almost all Arsenal fans and some responses of the neutrals. This should be the moment when this problem becomes well addressed. Players are clearly told to get at Arsenal by roughing them up. They announce that frankly in the media and more importantly they are proud of doing it.
Margins between hard/fair and hard/dangerous is not small. Chelsea is a very good example, players such as Didier Drogba, Michael Ballack and John Terry, they out-muscled their opponents and, in doing so, out-played them, too. Competing with their athleticism, which then lead to domination in technical areas. This is a part of adequate football.
The other, more beautiful part, is what Arsenal do; winning by out-passing the opponent. This was the reason to make me a proud fan of Arsenal. I’m an overseas fan, born and raised in baghdad and lives in Holland since 11 years. I was attracted few years ago to the best league in the world and in no time I was a crazy about the fascinating football of arsenal.
No body should be allowed to compensate for his technical inferiority through rough tackling. The media has created a climate which legitimizes rough tactics as a way of beating us. this gives also explanation to arsenals (always) long injury list. Wenger moaning about that, but was always dismissed.
As a foreigner I’m very aware what the media can create in the mind of people .. and even I’m coming from iraq, which tells enough about what I had seen, I was very emotional and almost crying for what happened to Ramsey. The media does not kill people now, fortunately. The media kills football. Pure football should be protected … Arsenal should be protected.
Stoke should be forced to pay for the treatment and wages as a matter of course.
Should Shawcross be allowed to play, let alone train in the time it takes Aaron to recover? IF he was the good guy the media had him out to be he'd be at Rambo's side throughout the recovery process.
Should Stoke be forced to find a player of at least equal value to cover Aaron's absence? The reality of the situation is that one business has damaged another's assets due to gross negligence. In the real world, this should mean compensation. Unfortunately violent tackles are not only encouraged, they're defended. Stoke's mentality of kicking anything that moves coupled with incompetent refereeing is what caused the injury - why are they allowed to get away with it?
UFC is a full contact sport, and even they have rules about excessive violence, and matches are closely refereed to prevent horrific injuries.
I'm disgusted by football right now.
We already see one comment earlier from some gormless moron who claims sides aren't told to get stuck in when playing Arsenal.
People like that seem to think you can't prove that this was said in the change room before the game, and they conveniently "refuse to believe" it, despite truck loads of rather obvious evidence.
I think Arsenal do have a provable case in terms of the law.
pulis did and said nothing when his player, fuller, announced that they were going to "rough up" Arsenal when we played them.
That is a blatant threat, which just so happens to be a criminal offence.
It is also a clear declaration of intent.
pulis, as manager, had a duty to correct and mitigate against any such behaviour.
He did, and said, precisely nothing about it.
That makes him culpable.
That would be very hard to explain away in a court of law.
I think Arsenal should get stuck in and give these cowards something to think about.
If someone crashes into my car, even if it is an accident, then their insurance company pays out. Not just for the car, but for any injury I sustain.
Why shouldn't footballers be forced to put a small percentage of their massive earnings into an insurance account?
And when it comes to cup competitions, the amount of money that is generated by FA Cup games etc should allow the minnows to take out insurance for one game - otherwise the FA should have an insurance policy in place.
Most football clubs have thankfully moved away from the dark days of the 1970s when common assault was committed every week on England's pitches. It's a pity that those who govern the sport both in this country and globally are still living in the dark ages.
I think the idea that opposing teams should pay compensation for injuries would be absurd. If this happened no team outside maybe the top four could play one another. Maybe it could work if you withdraw all players earning more than £5k a week from all competitions - again I think we can all agree this wouldn't work either! Compesation culture would see the demise of all cup competitions INCLUDING the Champions League!