Both Arsenal and Liverpool should have been awarded a penalty on Saturday evening thanks to the actions of their keepers, so why are the pundits and ref experts saying they weren’t fouls?
When you punch a player in the head on a football pitch, that tends to be a foul (at the very least) so why were both Bernd Leno and Alisson able to do it in their boxes with impunity?
After the game, BT Sport spoke to their former referee, Peter Walton, who was a shambles when he was actively refereeing and has shown no signs of improving since.
He declared neither incident a foul because, well, I’m not really sure what his reasoning was.
Literally just heard Peter Walton on BT saying keepers are allowed to completely miss the ball & clatter into an attacker in the box because "physical contact is part of the game". What a fucking joke! #ARSLIV
— Get Bendt (@LagoonerBeach) November 3, 2018
Leaving aside the fact that football is actually a semi-contact sport not a full-contact sport like mixed martial arts, how ridiculous is this?
We don’t accept this sort of behaviour anywhere else on the pitch. An outfield player is expected to time his challenges correctly otherwise he gives away, at the very least, a foul.
So why are keepers exempt?
You don’t even need video to show these were clear fouls, the stills are enough:
To my eye, the Alisson one is more clear-cut but both are fouls and both should have been penalties.
Who is Peter Walton?
Peter Walton is a 59-year-old former referee and current general manager of the Professional Referee Organisation (PRO) in the States. He was a FIFA-listed ref for two years between 1996 and 1998.
He apparently retired as a Premier League ref back in 2012.
Nobody noticed.