An exceedingly harsh penalty awarded against Arsenal loanee Mazeed Ogungbo continued to raise questions about the handball rule on Saturday.

Mazeed Ogungbo playing for Crawley Town (Photo via Crawley Town on Twitter)
Mazeed Ogungbo playing for Crawley Town (Photo via Crawley Town on Twitter)

With 11 minutes left of Crawley Town’s match against Tranmere Rovers on Saturday, Arsenal’s Mazeed Ogungbo was introduced to try and help see out a 2-1 lead for his side.

Yet a couple of minutes later, that cameo appearance got off to the worst possible start, as Tranmere were awarded a penalty for an Ogungbo handball.

Fortunately, Crawley’s Corey Addai stepped up with a big save to keep his side ahead, but that shouldn’t let us brush over the initial decision to give the spot-kick.

Ogungbo showed his man down the line, before sliding in to block the cross. But as he slid, the Tranmere man opted to try a cutback, and the ball hit Ogungbo’s hand as he placed it on the floor to break his fall.

You can watch the incident for yourself from 1:20 in the video linked or below.

The time between the ball leaving the foot of the crosser and hitting Ogungbo’s hand was between two and three frames of video footage, so 0.08-0.13 seconds. That’s significantly less than the average human reaction time to visual stimuli.

As mentioned, Ogungbo’s hand was out to support his body as he fell, which is specifically mentioned in the IFAB directory as an example of an incident that shouldn’t result in a penalty.

To sum up, there is no way it was humanly possible for Ogungbo to react to the cutback as it happened, and the position of his arm was both natural and allowed by the rules.

Mazeed Ogungbo signing for Crawley Town (Photo via CrawleyTownFC.com)
Mazeed Ogungbo signing for Crawley Town (Photo via CrawleyTownFC.com)

Officials make mistakes, and perhaps that’s all this was. Maybe the referee didn’t see the incident clearly, or he misremembered the rules.

But it’s yet another example of a handball decision going against common sense.

The subjectivity built into the handball rule is somewhat inevitably going to lead to some inconsistency. It would just be nice to have some consistency when the situation is as black and white as this particular call should have been.

When IFAB have specifically advised not to give a penalty under certain conditions and then you give a penalty under those exact conditions, something is going wrong somewhere.

Karmic forces sorted things out with a penalty save and a win for Crawley on this occasion, but next time could well be different.