Referees know they can make a mistake on a bad tackle when they see an incident in a flash and it’s a cop-out not to punish serious fouls on the basis of video evidence
We all make mistakes. Even us football writers, as difficult as it may be to believe, have been known to drop the odd ricket over the years. I must confess, to my eternal shame, that in the mild panic of a last-minute, potentially deadline-busting goal during my early years of covering Manchester City I managed to type in the wrong name for the scorer, Gareth Taylor, and credit his heroics to, well, this is awkward ... myself instead.
The readers of the newspaper I was working for at the time – and Gareth himself, I imagine – must have been bemused to find this rather fanciful version of events slipped past the subeditors and made it into the opening line of the subsequent match report. The only consolation being that it was, thank heavens, before the years when Twitter’s pitchfork mob could be found scouring the internet for fresh prey.
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A player embedded his studs into another man’s thigh, injuring his opponent and getting away with it scot-free
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