Clive Tyldesley : Football should not ape Parliament…

Rees-Mogg makes himself an easy target. But the smug, dismissive contempt in his voice is sneeringly disrespectful. Sean Dyche can dig out a referee pretty brutally but at least he usually concedes ‘they’ve got a difficult job’. Football is not always a happy family but it tries to preserve family values. We are all in it together.
Parliament now seems set apart from the rest of us. Football must never go there. 

Football is becoming bored of VAR. It is our version of the back-stop. Handball is the real curse on the game right now. Just as proroguing our rowdy Houses was a measure dreamt up for times of plague, famine and war, so handball was originally written into the ancient laws to stop outfield players punching and catching the ball. ‘Deliberate’ was the only word in the rule book that mattered.

Then somebody with a ‘better’ education than most of us in football took it upon themselves to try to define ‘deliberate’. The moment this exercise in legal drafting began, the spirit of the law started to disappear into scholastic conceptualising on a par with Standing Order 24. Football is many things but it is not scholastic.

Like the country, football has much bigger issues than the ones that fill the headlines. How we deal with dodgy decisions and offside armpits will only mirror our capacity to come to terms with racism, financial malpractice and mental health within the game. It really will.

However high the next Neymar fee is, however many clubs there are in the next version of the Champions League or the World Cup, football must not lose touch with its public, with its electorate.