Mings the merciful and a tale of two handballs

HANDLE WITH CARE
A pint of foaming shaft belonging to the hardest bloke in the pub. The wrong child from nursery. Somebody’s else’s suitcase at the airport carousel. Who among us hasn’t picked something up by mistake and been forced to rue our error? However, few have done so as publicly as Tyrone Mings, who in front of 23,466 largely delighted attendees at the Jan Breydel Stadion, made the critical error of picking up the ball after a short goal kick had been prodded his way by Villa goalkeeper Emi Martínez during Aston Villa’s Bigger Cup match against Club Brugge. While Football Daily can only guess what was going through the skipper’s mind as he leaned over, picked up the ball and placed it on the edge of the six-yard box, we have a fair idea what his manager was thinking when the ref proceeded to award the home side a penalty for handball. Unai Emery’s expression ran the gamut from bafflement, through withering contempt and finally settled on pure thunder.

Already on a yellow card in his Bigger Cup debut, Mings was inexplicably spared a second booking for what can charitably be described as his brain freeze, but the Belgians’ captain, Hans Vanaken, scored from the spot and won the game thanks to the defender’s act of absent-mindedness. As funny as it was, it was difficult not to empathise with Mings, making only his second appearance after 14 months on the sidelines with a serious knee injury, an absence so lengthy he apparently forgot the laws of the game he plays for a living. “It is a very, very strange mistake, but it’s football,” sighed Emery, whose side are still very handily placed in the extremely long group stage table. “We have to forget it quickly. It’s the biggest mistake I have witnessed in my career. This mistake is not going to happen again for a long time – I don’t think in my lifetime.”

Then again, it’s an error that has already happened twice in one German second division match this season, while Mings’s rick was almost an exact replica of an incident in which Arsenal defender Gabriel picked up the ball from a goal kick nudged his way by David Raya against Bayern Munich last season. On that particular occasion Gabriel’s blushes were spared, with the referee subsequently telling Bayern’s manager that he wasn’t going to punish what he viewed as “a kid’s mistake”. And while the decision to award Brugge a penalty prompted some pearl-clutching over “the spirit of the game”, as masters of the dark arts of time-wasting and extreme faffery when it comes to dawdling over goal kicks, on balance it can be argued Villa probably deserved their licks on this occasion.

While the Mings mishap was the first recorded foul of its kind in the history of football that Arsenal got away with and another team was punished for, Gunners fans were given their own reasons to gripe later in the evening when they were denied a stonewall spot kick before conceding what looked an extremely harsh one in their defeat at Inter. “We were extremely harshly done,” fumed Mikel Arteta, with some justification, after a game that could have gone either way despite the home side having just one shot on target: their penalty. “These are the margins in this game so it’s very hard to accept. There’s nothing unfortunately that we can do and we’re not going to be able to change it.” With a daunting Premier League assignment at Chelsea looming this weekend, the Arsenal manager may also want to voice his annoyance at some of his stars’ noticeably weak performances.

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QUOTE OF THE DAY
“Four days before the final, Daniel Levy called us all together to announce that, with the support of a sponsor, we would each receive a luxury aviator watch from the club. At first, we were excited to see the elegant boxes. Then we opened them and discovered he’d had the back of each timepiece engraved with the player’s name and ‘Champions League Finalist 2019’. ‘Finalist’. Who does such a thing at a moment like this? I still haven’t got over it, and I’m not alone. If we’d won, he wouldn’t have asked for the watches back to have ‘winner’ engraved instead” – Hugo Lloris gets some Spurs-related things off his chest in extracts from his new book.

FOOTBALL DAILY LETTERS
I can assure you that the fan who chucked a pig’s head on to the field at Corinthians v Palmeiras (yesterday’s Football Daily) was a Corintiano because no away fans are allowed into either stadium for derbies between these teams” – Ryan Lloyd.
In these corporate days of uber-professional football, with managers having a dozens of people in their coaching teams, marginal gains, and players having chefs, trainers and strict regimes, Mikel Arteta being so dozy he picks the ball up before it has gone out of play and Tyrone Mings being so unobservant he picks up the ball to place it for a goal kick just after Emi Martínez has already taken it is a heartening throwback to a bygone era. In which case, can we also bring back £5 admission and no waiting lists for season tickets?” – Noble Francis.
Arguably Celtic’s best European display for two decades received a paltry 22 words of coverage in my third favourite tea-time daily football email newsletter (yesterday’s News, Bits and Bobs, full email edition). That’s almost short enough to be conveyed in haiku form, in fact:
Celtic roars at home,
Leipzig silenced, three to one,
Press turns a blind eye” – Joe Brown.
Flogging the dead horse which is the ‘great headlines’ thread (Football Daily letters passim) while simultaneously patting myself on the back, I humbly submit one I wrote when working as a sports reporter/sub for the Slough and Windsor Observer. Windsor and Eton FC were knocked out of the FA Cup in the qualifying round by the Met Police and our headline was: ‘They fought the law … and the law won.’ Enough years have passed that I can confess that although I covered the fortunes of W&E, I was hoping they would lose solely so I could use that” –