Red cards for tugging a player’s hair? Pull the other one

The humble bobble has bedevilled football pitches since time immemorial – but not like this. “He’s touched his hair,” said Michael Carrick this week, in some peeved and highly collectible post-match remarks, “and ended up pulling the bobble out, and he gets sent off.”

Yes, that kind of bobble – the elasticated hair-tie kind of bobble, and with Carrick somewhat shooting his own argument in the foot there by inadvertently reminding us that the “touch” on Dominic Calvert-Lewin that earned Manchester United’s Lisandro Martínez a red card last Monday night was at least meaty enough to strip the scrunchy out of the Leeds forward’s man-bun.

And, of course, merely to speak of these things is to bring the ghosts of the game mournfully to the window, sighing and shaking their grey heads and telling you that nobody ever had to defend Sir Stanley Matthews over pulling another player’s bobble out, nor even Billy Bremner. But here we are, and for his VAR-witnessed bun destruction, Martínez will now serve the statutory three-game ban.

And good for football, some say, for trying to legislate with such blistering efficiency in this unhappy and also pretty damn painful area. Hair-pull with bobble removal? Red card and three-match ban. Hair-pull without bobble removal? Same. For football, hair-pulling is very much like biting. Just as the officials now brook no argument over the distinction between a vicious gnash and an affectionate nibble, there will be no quibbling over bobbles, for all that people like Carrick might try it on. A hair-pull is a hair-pull is a hair-pull.

And, of course, managers resent the game for this blinding clarity – “ridiculous”, according to David Moyes on another occasion – unless, of course, it’s their own players getting their bobbles tugged. In which case, as Louis Van Gaal famously (and also just a little disconcertingly) said, after Manchester United’s Marouane Fellaini had suffered an egregious hair-pull in 2016: “Only in sex masochism.”

However, it’s not hard to imagine Van Gaal taking a more pragmatic view had he still been in charge when Fellaini himself went unpunished for a pull on the hair of Mattéo Guendouzi of Arsenal in 2018, an incident somehow the more dismaying for being (despite Fellaini’s then recent decision to crop his hair tight) fundamentally “hair on hair”, and a rare instance, you could say, of the poacher turning hairdresser.

But Carrick thought last week’s decision was “shocking”, and, as managers do, he seemed keen to insist that there are degrees of hair-pulling – shades, nuances, areas for subtle interpretation that the law ought to be more flexible on. Some pulls are bigger than others, was the implication.

In other words, he would be keen to see this thing made more complicated than it needs to be. And actually, I’m kind of with him, at least from the angle that those of us who watch the game will then have something else to get regularly agitated about, which is what we enjoy. Like when they tweaked the rule on where the ball sits for corners. Almost never contentious before; now contentious practically every time. Perfect.

Maybe we need to call Arsène Wenger. Fifa’s chief of global football development has been thinking very hard about offside. Perhaps he could now be encouraged to suggest that, for any hair-pull to be punishable, there must be daylight between the bobble and the shirt collar. Maybe they could trial the system over the summer, produce some data. Does this new way of doing things produce decision-making which is obscure, time-consuming and ultimately enraging? Bring it on!

And does leg-hair count? Arm-hair? Even allowing for waxing, it’s surely worth considering.

“All we’re asking for is consistency,” managers will say. Not fans, though – not really. Deep down we’re hoping for its opposite – inconsistency, with all its glorious opportunities for chaos, incredulity and years of bitter resentment. And even where inconsistency is seemingly unavailable, we’ll create it for ourselves.

“He’s barely shifted his bobble there!” Let’s get that one up alongside some of the game’s other cherished cries, such as “He got the ball!”, “He’s hardly touched him!” and “How is that offside?” Help us, Arsène.

Photograph by H. Armstrong Roberts/ClassicStock/Getty Images