In an era of bad faith, safety protocols are at obvious risk of exploitation

The problem with a game that takes itself as seriously as football is that protocols put in place for protection may be gamed, but is there a way of working around that?

There’s a certain irony to the fact that one of the incidents that I remember the most vividly from my own years of playing football should have involved concussion. There were about fifteen minutes to play when our goalkeeper’s head interfaced with an opposing forward’s elbow. He was out cold on the ground for at least a good five minutes before getting woozily back onto his feet playing out that last quarter of an hour, wandering aimlessly around his penalty area as if he didn’t know what he was doing out in this weather wearing shorts at that time of day.

After the match, we took him to the hospital. After a fairly lengthy delay in being seen, concussion was confirmed. I phoned him the following day, and he had no recollection of the previous day whatsoever, not the four hours in A&E, not the injury itself, nothing of that day whatsoever. To this day, I still feel a little guilty over not having insisted on his immediate withdrawal from the game, but in all honesty I didn’t understand the potential ramifications of concussion at the time, and I suspect that there are many who still don’t now.

It’s an incident that springs to mind every day there’s a head injury on a football pitch. This guy was knocked out pretty much cold, yet not only did we carry on, but as soon as he was able to move he was back up and playing. It wasn’t that we didn’t believe the consequences of his injury couldn’t be serious, more that we didn’t really think that they existed. Concussion often seemed to exist in the midway point between injury and comedy trope. Long-term consequences were not considered.

Thirty-odd years on from that, it should be considered a sign of progress that we now consider these injuries more seriously than we used to. The application of a cold sponge to the forehead is no longer considered the peak of medical attention in professional sport. It’s probably not taken as seriously as some would like—there remains a case for saying that perhaps heading should be banned altogether—but it is definitely taken more seriously than it used to be, and that’s something.

There’s also greater attention given to medical emergencies among supporters. It is now increasingly common because someone in the crowd requires medical attention, and it is a good thing that people in that position get the sort of immediate attention that they clearly need. In any social gathering situation, the physical wellbeing of those in attendance should always be the most important consideration, far beyond anything else, and we now have protocols for this.

But while we take this wellbeing more seriously than we used to, those within the game also seem to take winning more seriously as well, and this leads to the distasteful possibility of these protocols potentially being gamed by the unscrupulous. Of course, it’s extremely difficult to judge ‘intention’. This is reflected in the laws of the game, which removed that particularly caustic and controversial word more than a quarter of a century ago. But while it can sometimes feel as though there is some sort of unspoken rule that we can’t even talk about the possibility of some people gaming these protocols for their own narrow self-gain, there are times when it feels as though precisely this could be taking place.

Two incidents from very different positions on football’s food chain have thrown the matter into the public eye. In the Premier League, a ‘head injury’ that didn’t seem to be a head injury led, in tandem with some pretty dreadful refereeing, to a late winning goal which could eventually be worth millions of pounds, while down in the non-league game the abandonment of a match following an incident in the crowd has caused a furious response from those on the receiving end of it.

At The City Ground on Saturday afternoon, a stoppage-time collision between the Liverpool goalkeeper Caoimhin Kelleher and his teammate Ibrahima Konaté resulted in Konaté going down clutching his head. As per the head injuries protocol, play was stopped. But this was where referee Paul Tierney came into his own. When a drop ball was given, he gave unchallenged possession of the ball back to Liverpool, even though Forest’s Callum Hudson-Odoi had it on the edge of the Liverpool penalty area when the whistle blew. The ramifications of such a mistake were there for all to see when Darwin Núñez scored the only goal of the game less than a couple of minutes later.

Attention over this has been focused on the referee ever since (because, let’s face it, even for those of us who are inclined to defend referees against the often unhinged things that are routinely said about them every week nowadays, there are times when errors are so egregious as to be indefensible), but the question of what Konaté was doing in a crumpled heap on the floor in the first place has received somewhat less attention. Certainly, he acted as though he’d received a head injury until less than five seconds after the referee’s whistle blew to stop play. Play broken up. Job done. If anything, being given possession of the ball afterwards was just icing on the cake.

None of this is intended as a specific criticism of Konaté in particular. It seems to be pretty much commonly accepted that players will be instructed to stay down with such an injury should it benefit their team for them to do so. Players do this sort of thing—or seek to do this sort of thing—all the time. But it says something for how fundamentally unseriously the game continues to treat head injuries that a situation like this can come to pass in the first place. It’s certainly not difficult to see why Nottingham Forest may not feel as though they should just accept this sort of thing with a shrug of the shoulders and a hearty cry of, “Ah well, that’s life!”

The second incident took place substantially lower down football’s food chain on Saturday afternoon, in the National League South. It’s reasonable to say that it hadn’t been a particularly successful afternoon in Berkshire for Bath City, who are currently in the chase for a play-off place—and, as an aside, what a chase it is, with five clubs all tied on 57 points after three-quarters of the season has been played—but who found themselves 4-0 down at half-time against a Slough Town side for whom a win would put them on 56 points, just a point behind them.

Bath recovered well in the second half, but with eighteen minutes to play and the score still 4-2 to Slough, a home supporter fell ill behind the Bath goal and required medical attention which took around 23 minutes to administer from the point of the injury to the point of the abandonment (it should be added that the supporter concerned is recovering), but at the end of that the match was abandoned, reportedly because the Bath manager Jerry Gill refusing to allow his team back out onto the pitch because he was concerned over a ‘player welfare’ issue, that one of his players might suffer an injury after having spent so long in the changing room.

It’s difficult not to raise your eyebrows at such a suggestion. Many matches have been subject to delays over the years, and yet there is no record of a significantly higher number of injuries afterwards. And regardless, if his players hadn’t been kept warmed up during such a delay, would that not surely be… Gill’s responsibility, as the manager? It’s difficult to believe that the Bath manager would have been as concerned about ‘player welfare’ had his team been winning 4-2 at the time.

And while goals in the National League South don’t carry the same sort of financial ramifications for clubs as goals in the Premier League can, this decision could yet have quite an effect on the league table by the end of the season. A win for Slough would have put them on 56 points, just one shy of the play-off places themselves, with ten league games of the season left to play. After the match, the Slough manager Scott Davies described the incident as his opponents having pulled a “swift one”, so we all know where he stands on the matter. Gill’s post-match comments were… less than convincing.

Furthermore, there were ramifications to Gill’s decision which stretched beyond ‘mere’ football. More than 1,400 people had turned out for this match. Do they get refunded? If so, who pays for it? Would Slough have to just grin and bear the cost of a lower attendance for a replayed match on a Tuesday night? They might not be the only ones counting the cost either. Slough has designated this match as a charity match for Thames Hospice, with their team wearing a special kit which was due to be auctioned off after the match. This auction had to be postponed as well.

The Laws of the Game themselves are an exercise in buck-passing: “An abandoned match is replayed unless the competition rules or organisers determine otherwise.” There are further guidelines (note that this isn’t even considered a potential reason for an abandonment being called in the linked article), but otherwise the matter is left to competitions and competition organisers themselves. So let’s have a look at what they say. The matter of abandonments is covered by section 8 of the FA’s Standardised Rules (PDF), “Playing of Matches”, but they don’t make any reference to this sort of situation at all, either.

The idea that players could be considered at risk in the way that Jerry Gill described seems weak. After all, half-time is a 15 minute break that occurs in the middle of every single game that is ever played, yet we don’t hear of players collapsing with muscle tears because they’ve not been kept warm during that break. And again, if that did happen to one of his players, wouldn’t that be… his responsibility? The Standardised Rules—and this is really a reflection of that brief mention under the Laws of the Game—again imply that this will all be to the league’s discretion, and this gives the National League a degree of leverage against Bath City, should they choose to exert it.

The obvious thing for the National League to do is simply to allow the result of the Slough match to stand. Would that suck for Bath City supporters? Yes, it probably would, but perhaps they should take that up with the manager of their own club. If anything, they’re victims here as well. They had a couple of hundred travelling supporters who would have to make that fairly lengthy journey again were the match to be replayed. They might have appreciated the gamesmanship, but they probably wouldn’t have appreciated the cost.

It’s certainly within the National League’s ability to do this. They have to judge on a balance of probabilities whether Gill was acting in good faith. If they conclude that he was, then there’s a case for a replay. These protocols have been in place for a few years now, so there’s plenty of historical evidence to fall back upon. Have any Bath matches had similar delays in recent seasons, and what was the club’s reaction to those?

Well, yes, in this case, there is one high profile incident. In November 2022, Bath player Alex Fletcher was critically injured after colliding with a wall at Twerton Park during a match in this very division against Dulwich Hamlet for which he required “emergency neurosurgery to stabilise his condition”. Fletcher eventually returned to playing, but this particular match was abandoned and replayed, and understandably so. But this, of course, is a completely different set of circumstances to the possibility of a player pulling a muscle because they’ve warmed down, so can or should this even be taken into consideration?

Much will likely come to depend on the referee’s report. Only the referee has the power to abandon a match, but when a manager refuses to allow his team back onto the pitch, it could be argued that he didn’t have much choice. Did he say, “Okay, take five minutes to get the players warmed up, then?” Was this decision just waved through by the officials? Not even for the first first time in the last week or so, I’m left wondering whether this level of the game is aware of how tinpot this sort of thing makes all concerned look.

The most important thing of all concerning the Slough Town vs Bath City match is that the supporter concerned appears to be okay. But that two incidents should have happened on the same weekend at different levels of the game does raise the question of whether football takes those who act in bad faith seriously enough.

It’s certainly not unique to this country. We all saw the pushing and pulling that happened at the end of a recent match in Brazil. But there does seem to be a growing level of dissatisfaction at how all-encompassing this seeking to gain the smallest possible advantage has become, from tactical fouls to time-wasting. The protocols relating to head injuries and medical incidents in the crowd should stay in place. But what does need to change is how the game reacts to them. Presumptions of good faith, it might well be argued, simply aren’t worth what they used to be.