Liverpool and Isak deserve sympathy, but we can’t punish tackles on consequence above intent | OneFootball

Liverpool’s frustration at the loss of Alexander Isak to injury is entirely understandable.

That’s the only fair starting point, because frustration does sometimes make all of us irrational. So we get it.

But the response of Liverpool-aligned pundits and journalists and their manager are at risk of sending football down a road where no good can come. Once you start measuring the unacceptability level of a tackle based on its outcome, you end up with a mess.

Is Arne Slot right to be annoyed that he’s just lost a £125m footballer for the next few months? Absolutely. Is he right to blame that on a perfectly normal tackle that literally every single defender on earth worth their salt would attempt? No.

Even Slot himself grudgingly conceded a defender who didn’t attempt what Micky van de Ven attempted on Saturday evening would be criticised. Jamie Carragher said on Sky he would have done exactly what Van de Ven did.

Slot’s assertion that 10 times out of 10 that tackle carries a serious risk of injury doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense; you can’t have an absolute like 10/10 and then caveat it later on.

The unfortunate reality of football, a high-speed contact sport played by enormously strong and powerful athletes is that every tackle becomes a ‘potential leg-breaker’ if the player on the receiving end is unfortunate enough. What the sport should and does try to legislate against are those tackles unnecessary enough, reckless enough and with insufficient control to unacceptably elevate that risk.

Van de Ven clearly doesn’t meet that criteria here. This was two fine players hellbent on their respective task; Isak trying to score, Van de Ven trying to prevent it. Neither has any specific interest in the other. That Isak’s leg plants at the precise moment Van de Ven appears really is just nothing more than bad luck.

There is no mystery as to why Van de Ven is there, how fast he’s travelling or how he’s trying to do what he’s trying to do. And until the severity of Isak’s injury started to become clear, nobody had an issue.

And that’s where we start to head towards trouble. We really cannot punish tackles for their consequence, or judge players’ intentions on that basis. Football, like any sport, exists as a balancing act where the requirements and entertainment value of the sport itself are weighed against the risks.

No, we don’t want a sport where players can deliberately set out to injury each other and make unnecessary or unnecessarily dangerous challenges. But nor do we want a sport so watered down that nobody dares do anything, because everything comes with risk.

It’s worth saying this is not a Liverpool problem. It’s not even really a problem. It’s a football fandom situation. This is just the current example. Everyone screaming that Van de Ven should be banned would be enthusiastically applauding any player on their own team who made that challenge successfully; and if the argument is that this was a reckless tackle then really its success or failure should be moot.

Which brings us to another interesting element of this particular discourse. Because what we think a lot of the Liverpool journos in particular are doing with this one is conflating two related but separate situations. Deliberately or otherwise, it helps muddy the waters.

Because while we wouldn’t even have what Van de Ven did down as a yellow card – and nor, if they were honest, would anyone else be saying anything about it whatsoever had Isak walked away unharmed as was the overwhelming likelihood – it is still definitely a foul.

And, while we’re now firmly in the realm of the hypothetical, our suspicion is that had Isak’s shot not found the back of Guglielmo Vicario’s net, then no penalty would have been awarded. Only a guess, sure, but it’s not a wild one.

The unwritten rule that allows defenders pretty much carte blanche if the attacker ‘gets their shot away’ is a problem. We have never agreed with it as an idea. Very occasionally a penalty will be awarded despite an attacker ‘getting their shot away’ but it’s so rare that when it does happen people are – again, understandably – aggrieved if it’s given against them because you normally get away with it.

But it’s palpably nonsense. We do not apply this logic to a midfielder ‘getting his pass away’ before a late tackle hits in midfield and there is no good reason why it should apply to a striker in the box.

In this way, a level of reasonableness has been acquired by complaints that really have none. Because the valid bit is hypothetical in this instance, but adds credibility to the complaints about what actually happened.

Now that itself is also just enormously football. We’re even doing it ourselves here, getting worked up about the hypothetical non-award of a theoretically non-existent penalty.

But at least that’s not going to ruin anything other than our morning. Policing perfectly normal tackles that have deeply unfortunate consequences really does threaten the fabric of a sport where some risk and misfortune simply has to be the price we pay for the spectacle.