No, Kalvin Phillips should not be ‘reprimanded’ - The Square Ball 28/4/22


DEAL WITH HIM

Written by: Moxcowhite • Daniel Chapman

“He is a good player and we defended against him well as a team,” Kalvin Phillips said on Monday night, asked about Wilfried Zaha after Leeds’ game with Crystal Palace. “The ref complained at us for fouling him, but I think he dives a lot, to be honest with you.”

Loads of people think that. Zaha has been playing for twelve years, and in that time, loads of people have noticed that he often dives to win free-kicks. Sometimes he is fouled, sometimes he isn’t, sometimes he doesn’t dive, quite often he does. People talk about that, then, but according to some Crystal Palace fans on social media, Kalvin Phillips should not be one of them. So there’s a reason why Twitter is under offer at $44bn.

One fan, a Palace podcast host, has tried laying down some law by posting a thread of video clips of Zaha hitting the deck, and explaining how none of them are dives. ‘Clear foul … Not a foul, immediately up … Clear foul’, and so on. The first ‘clear foul’ is very clearly a dive but then I would think that, as a Leeds fan, just as the Palace fan would think otherwise. That’s normal!

But social media has so distorted some people’s sense of self that they think they can will facts into being by summarising a series of personal judgements into a Twitter thread and using a Very Serious Voice, like they’re presenting evidence to The Hague rather than posting videos of footballers kicking each other and/or falling down. They’re mistaken. No matter how much a tweeter with a name like ‘Red ‘n’ Blue Army’ tries to present theirs as dispassionate objective analysis, it is not and never can be anything but a series of opinion tweets by a Crystal Palace fan who really likes Wilf Zaha. It would be weird if they were not biased towards their faves, and it’s self-denial to claim they’re objective.

Weirdest of all is the tweet that followed all these clips, calling for Phillips to be ‘reprimanded’. Reprimanded by who? And, really, in the end, for what? ‘Because he said Wilf Zaha dives a lot’. Does that sound sensible to anyone when you say it out loud? Try phoning your mother up, and telling her you just sent eleven tweets about how Kalvin Phillips ‘should be reprimanded’ for saying he thinks Wilf Zaha dives a lot. Picture her disappointed face when she puts the phone down, sighs, and worrying slightly, goes back to watching Eastenders. Call your favourite teacher from school, you know, the one who always believed in you, who said you could become anything you dreamed of. But Skype them, so you can be certain that when you tell them why you want some authority to ‘reprimand Kalvin Phillips’ that the sound you’re hearing is of a dropping tear.

Sadly Kalvin probably has incurred some form of reprimand, even if it’s only United’s media team or one of the agencies representing him calling him and yelling, ‘Not again!’ We already had a huge hoo-ha this season when Phillips was asked why Marcelo Bielsa was playing him in defence, and said, “To be honest I don’t know why he did it.” People who hadn’t seen so many Kalvin interviews over the years didn’t want to understand this was just a variation on his stock non-committal answer about things that don’t really concern him. Phillips is not the sort to ask too many questions when his coach gives him a job. He’s the sort to just do his best at the task he’s given and answer, honestly, that he didn’t go too far back into the tactical theories underpinning playing twenty yards deeper, delving into the ‘why’ in search of motivation for doing something Bielsa had asked him to do dozens of times already. With his next breath in that interview, he gave his understanding of that day’s gig anyway. “We wanted to be more defensive with their attacking threat. Me and Liam Cooper went man for man marking.” Why? Honestly, that was Bielsa’s business.

Phillips will also answer honestly that he thinks Zaha dives a lot, so he thinks Zaha should be getting more earache off the ref, not just the players trying to tackle him. It’s hardly controversial stuff. It’s the game. Players try to tackle Zaha or foul him, Zaha tries to beat their tackles or win free-kicks. If the ref is dealing with one, he should be dealing with the other. It’s pretty cynical, in both directions, but that’s how footballers have to play since the Premier League became The Most Serious Sport Business.

What gets forgotten is that much of what happens on a football pitch would just be funny if you let it be. That’s the value of the Luke Ayling flop, especially when Bill has the audacity to moan at Zaha for diving, then next minute flop down on the ball to win yet another free-kick. Ayling always laughs these off, because it just isn’t that deep. Neither is Kalvin saying Wilf dives a lot. He’s just been on the pitch with him, playing a game of football with him, and that’s how it went. Personally I think diving is a really bad thing in football and would like less of it, and as a football fan I have found Zaha hard to watch over the years. But Kalvin didn’t even sound angry about it!

We’re made to think this stuff is deep by the presentation of the game, constantly making loud claims of its own importance to browbeat you into tuning in again for the next underwhelming match. It’s only Crystal Palace against Leeds, and it’s only a free-kick one way or another, but the football economy is reliant on riling its viewers up into anger so that fans will be motivated to post angry tweet after angry tweet in support of Twitter dot com’s advertising sales business. Why do football commentators talk as much about the ‘talking points’ of which player said what about which manager, or how close a VAR call is, as about the actual game? Because their company’s advertising price list depends on ‘engagement’ and if nobody is talking about Palace versus Leeds, nobody is going to pay to advertise next to that again. And often there’s not much else in a 0-0 draw to help the broadcasters shift the product they paid billions up front for.

So football gets its fans angry, because anger drives more engagement than fun, and online fans end up accepting anger as their normal state of being, demanding blame as the natural outcome of every match, selling themselves into some bizarre state of outrage where footballers should be ‘reprimanded’ for speaking with a little personality, saying something that’s a little off-brand. We don’t need fans now policing the last slivers of joy out of the game, not after everybody else. That’s how we’ve ended up with so much cynicism, time-wasting, diving and fouling on the pitch; the received seriousness seeping through for years has increased the pressure being placed upon absolute trivia. In the Champions League semi-final on Wednesday night, I saw Jurgen Klopp haranguing the fourth official about the award of a throw-in on halfway. He and the justice tweeters feedback to each other through a hell boring loop, amplifying the least desirable parts of the game. Did anyone growing up fall in love with football hoping one day to be rage tweeting about a throw-in, or demanding reprimands from some undefined authority when one player expresses mild miffedness with another?

Plus I know whataboutism is the last refuge (but first call) of the online loser, but Jack Grealish said some mean things about Kalvin Phillips’ shoes and nobody wanted him reprimanded. Someone should put Jack Grealish in prison!

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