The Rational Ref | Swansea ball boy's act against Chelsea reflects poor gamesmanship in soccer
Teenager's boast about time-wasting act that led to Hazard's sending-off at Swansea illustrates the game's slide into dishonorable gamesmanship
Chelsea's Eden Hazard created his own danger zone for kicking, or appearing to kick, a misbehaving ball boy. Referee Chris Foy did not see the incident, when Swansea were protecting a 2-0 aggregate score against Chelsea during the Capital One Cup semi-final second leg at the Liberty Stadium last month. Foy, instead, relied on advice from his assistant referee and correctly sent off the 22-year-old Belgian for violent conduct.
The fact that the 17-year-old ball boy had bragged about his time-wasting responsibilities on social media, and magnificently mimicked the amateur dramatics of his celebrity soccer role models on home turf, does not excuse Hazard's impudent reaction. It merely provides context.
The context is soccer's slide into the depths of deceitful, dishonest and dishonorable delinquency. It is gamesmanship solely for the sake of winning at all costs and extends throughout all levels of the game, where it is widely expected that anyone associated with a club must possess and be seen to possess blind, unthinking and passionate allegiance.
This gamesmanship is increasingly malignant and has become highly infectious, affecting almost every stakeholder in the modern game. This is shown by the incredibly wide-ranging reactions of anyone who is capable of expressing a biased or provocative opinion - which is echoed and amplified by the media in all its diverse forms - so the cacophony of confusion, conflicts of interest and cheating drown out facts.
So instead of accepting Hazard's punishment for what it is - a standard three-match ban for violent conduct - opinions ran the gamut, from one extreme opining "Hazard deserves an eight-month ban similar to Eric Cantona's penalty for his flying kung-fu kick at a fan" all the way to the other extreme insisting "it wasn't a red card at all because Hazard kicked the ball, not the ball boy, who incidentally is the privileged son of Swansea's largest shareholder and director".
Because of these extreme and biased viewpoints, which unsurprisingly are inflated by the media, the FA initially reacted by stating that Hazard's three-match ban was "insufficient punishment".