The Martinelli on Bradley incident shows football needs to deal with time-wasting and a lack of on-pitch honesty before it’s too late…
A FEW WEEKS ago I read a Substack piece from a prominent online Evertonian.
I won’t name him, but as someone who is unashamedly up for Blues’ content, I delved into the piece about why this chap was so apparently disillusioned with life as a football fan.
You can insert your own jokes, but I genuinely hoped he’d touch on something that is increasingly ruining my experience watching this game in person or on television.
I was hoping he would write about players feigning injuries and the increasingly dangerous and infuriating precedent it’s setting across the Premier League.
Instead, he spouted about top six bias and VAR corruption, at which point I stopped reading.
Honestly, mate, ask Tottenham fans in what way they benefit from some greater, conspiratorial advantage. Their gaffer is bouncing round drinking from an Arsenal cup and players are fronting the fanbase.
Anyway, last night we witnessed exactly why players pretending to be hurt is now a massive problem for the game.
Conor Bradley could have a serious injury which needed immediate treatment from medical professionals. Instead, he had a ball thrown at him and was manhandled whilst in pain by an opposition player.
I don’t want to make this a Gabriel Martinelli hate piece. Martinelli has apologised and shown genuine remorse. And more importantly, Martinelli is a symptom of this issue which almost every elite level player subscribes to.
This yearning for advantage has completely blurred the lines around who needs treatment and when.
Last night Bradley suffered what looks like a knee injury, but my worry for a while is that a player might endure a head injury where literal seconds matter and nobody judges him in good faith.
Liverpool have a few examples of honesty which Arne Slot is now at pains to point to, most notably Manchester United scoring from an incident which left Alexis Mac Allister needing stitches, and Lucas Pacqueta’s sending off at West Ham.
Even last night, before the Bradley incident, there’s a moment where Bukayo Saka decides to volley Milos Kerkez at waist height because an Arsenal player is down and they want the game stopping. When Jeremie Frimpong was in the same situation first-half those players weren’t interested.
Again, this isn’t an Arsenal specific thing. It’s happening all over the country and there is zero precedent to deal with it.
Moreso, it’s fucking embarassing. I stand in The Kop at times and watch men over six-feet-tall weighing more than 15 stone in muscle writhing around like a toddler looking for attention.
That same fella would make you wince if you watched him launch into a 50/50 with someone, but these incredible athletes seem hell bent on using dramatic licence over physical attributes in a contact sport.
The PGMOL are never too far away from culpability with these things, and their insistence on micro-managing football now means that there’s a constant train of thought around how teams can score a man advantage if they ham up contact.
Recent Opta data shows the average time of a ball in play during a Premier League game is around 55 minutes. That is 55 out of 100 minute games on average. So we’re approaching around 45 percent of a game that some people are paying hundreds, even thousands to watch where football isn’t happening.
I don’t know the answer. I’ve seen people talking about countdown clocks and all sorts of innovations to combat time wasting, but how you genuinely identify when a player is injured and when he’s fabricating injury is impossible and relies solely on the integrity of those involved to steer us away from incidents like last night.
Slot’s virtue signalling around Liverpool’s honesty on the pitch is fine, but in a world mangled by whataboutery and tribalism that can be fantastical, falsified and now fabricated, that ultimately won’t get us any favour.
Martinelli should feel shit about his actions last night. But he isn’t the sole problem, only part of one which is heading for breaking point.
