With 19 minutes of Saturday’s Premier League game at Brentford played, Nottingham Forest led 1-0. The euphoria that had greeted Ivan Toney’s return after an eight-month ban for breaches of FA gambling regulations had begun to dissipate. The thought was that Brentford, disjointed against the team a place above them in the table, were in serious relegation trouble, that Toney might not be enough to save them. Then Mikkel Damsgaard was felled by Orel Mangala just outside the penalty area.
Matt Turner, Forest’s US goalkeeper, set his wall. Toney adjusted the position of the ball a few inches to the right. Then, as the referee Darren England fussed around the wall, Toney moved it a little further, this time taking up a handful of the referee’s disappearing foam and moving it as well. How far did he move it in total? Eighteen inches, perhaps? Maybe two feet maximum. It was enough. Toney strolled up and was able to arc the ball, apparently relatively easily – although free-kicks tend to look easy when they go in – between the edge of the wall and Callum Hudson-Odoi, guarding for runs on its outside edge, bringing it back inside Turner’s left-hand post.
Ivan Toney really got away with it. 😅 pic.twitter.com/9umCSrz6jL
— NBC Sports Soccer (@NBCSportsSoccer) January 20, 2024
Brentford had their equaliser and went on to win 3-2. After which Forest realised there was only one party to blame: England and his team, for having allowed Toney to move the ball before taking the free-kick. Forest have announced they will be writing to the PGMOL – the Professional Game Match Officials Limited, the body that governs the officiating of Premier League games – to protest.
It will not change the result. The goal will still stand. England and his team will not face sanction. Which is exactly as it should be. Once the game is done, it is done. Players often reposition the ball before taking a free-kick, as much as part of their ritual as anything else, but also to make sure it’s sitting cleanly on the grass. Perhaps what Toney did constituted moving the ball slightly further from its original position than is acceptable – and his subterfuge in moving the foam suggested he knew as much. But players push boundaries all the time. It’s the job of Forest players to be alert to that.
For Forest to claim the moral high ground is, frankly, pathetic. The free-kick was only awarded because Mangala had cynically tripped a player running into the box; he knew exactly what he was doing, making sure he committed the offence just the right side of the line not to give away a penalty. Later in the game, when Neal Maupay scored the winner, Forest’s assistant coach Rui Pedro Silva protested that the forward had controlled the ball with his arm in the buildup and was booked. It had not hit the arm, and the replay showed as much, very clearly. Forest fans, on the opposite side of the ground, having seen on the initial inconclusive replay on the big screen and presumably thinking Silva had seen something untoward, reacted with fury.
It’s not to impute a cynical motive to Silva’s actions, not to suggest he was deliberately whipping up the away support, to suggest he was being extremely irresponsible. If he had seen the replay and couldn’t accept what was obvious, then he’s probably too emotional to be useful seated on the bench during games. If he hadn’t seen a replay, then maybe it would be worth him checking such things in future before making a fool of himself.
That’s what makes the letter to the PGMOL so insidious. It can achieve nothing useful, beyond deflecting responsibility for a disjointed performance and a poor result on to the officials. And this is not just true of Forest. It’s true of all clubs who solemnly announce they will be writing to the PGMOL, something that has become an epidemic of late, perhaps an unintended consequence of the illusion of perfection raised by VAR. Liverpool perhaps had some justification after Luis Díaz’s wrongly disallowed goal away at Tottenham this season, given there had been such a failure of process, although even then it seemed a needless act of theatre. Other examples seem a calculated play to the base, an attempt to generate a sense of a club uniquely wronged.
Conspiracy theories are popular because they’re so comforting: it’s not our fault – what could we possibly have done with the world against us? The reputation of referees becomes collateral damage.
Forest didn’t lose on Saturday because Toney moved a free-kick a few inches to the right. They lost because Brentford were better than them, because they couldn’t handle Toney’s movement, because they struggled against inswinging corners, because Ryan Yates was crowded out in midfield and because Turner and his wall failed to spot an obvious ruse in plain sight. If they do go down, the likeliest reason will be a points deduction imposed for breaches of the Premier League’s profit and sustainability rules.
To blame the refereeing is to refuse to take responsibility. It’s childish, but it’s also dangerous.
