A surgeon’s view on the handball incident « Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News, supporting the club, the players and the manager
Arsenal on Twitter @UntoldArsenal
Untold Arsenal on Facebook here
By Walter Broeckx, the surgeon ref
One of our critical readers, and thank God we have many critical readers, didn’t accept right away my view on the penalty incident in our game against City.
Fair enough I think it is everyone is right to contest what I write and I am not a divine person who cannot make mistakes. I think those days are a few hundred years behind us I think.
So on a special demand I tried to make a short clip of it and then I will take a few frames from this clip to show you on what I based my decision. If you click on the link here
you should see a clip opening up somewhere on your computer.
Lets analyse this a bit and I will try to take a few frames from this clip. I left the running outside the penalty area out of this frame by frame pictures as nothing was wrong over there.
Walcott is fainting a possible shot or cross. Look at the arm of Kompany who is stopping his run and also has already managed to steady himself and has his arm behind his body.
Theo decides to run further and Kompany his arm are very close to his body, both arms in fact if you want to look very close.
A bit further on the field as Theo is running to the goal line. Kompany his arms are bit further away from his body.
Theo is setting himself to cross the ball to goal. You can see this and as Kompany is very good defender he knows that Theo will try to cross the ball. The goal line is coming nearer and it is a matter of now or never. And now look at the movement of the arms from Kompany as he opens his body and he also opens both his arms to make himself as wide as possible and to have the most chance to block the cross somehow.
And blocking the cross is what he does. He blocks it with his outstrechted left arm. Also take notice of the fact that in the whole action his arms never have been so far outstrechted as until the moment he knew the cross would definitly come.
The most important thing for me is the fact that he could have kept his arms close to his body as they were not running on high speed anymore. But as you can see the moment the cross was going to come he opened his body and swing out both his arms to spread himself. So there certainly was a movement from his arms and his arm blocked the cross.
So for me it is and was a penalty.
I also would like to thank anyone who doesn’t agree with me every now and then. Mostly it has as a result that I try to look at it again, again, again and again. And I go watching deeper and down and deeper.
So I do welcome any criticism on the ref reviews and in this case I left my wife, and a very popular TV quiz on TV over here in my country, to spend time seeing if I made a mistake. I think that I was right from the start on this. But if I had changed my mind I would have let you know.
Only a bad ref never admits a mistake.
Untold Arsenal: the index to the club today
An index of the players who played 100 or more times for Woolwich Arsenal
Making the Arsenal – the story of 1910. Now available post free.