We’ve seen a few incidents of on-pitch discussions about who is to take a penalty lately. From Kevin Mirallas to Daniel Sturridge last season in the Merseyside derby, it's happening more and more. I’m not a big fan of it as I believe your appointed penalty taker is your penalty taker and they take it in all situations.
Last night I reckon that Daniel Sturridge was the person on spot kick duty and that is who Jordan Henderson wanted to take it. But Mario Balotelli took the ball off him. I believe that Balotelli was trying to endear himself to the Liverpool fans and knock in a winning goal at the Kop end.
It all comes back to ego because if he missed it might have been the end of the road for him at the club. But I also believe that Balotelli’s actions undermined the manager and Brendan Rodgers had to field a load of questions about it in his post-match press conference.
I don’t think that the incident reflected badly on captain-in-waiting Jordan Henderson. If it was any other player, they might have looked at it a bit different but when it is Balotelli everyone knows that he doesn’t always act as you would expect.
Balotelli has one of the biggest egos in football and I don’t think any other Liverpool player would have done that to Henderson. I’m pretty sure Balotelli wouldn’t have done that if Steven Gerrard was on the pitch. It won’t have been mentioned after the game but I think this morning Balotelli would have got a message to ‘pop into the manager’s office’ where I hope he was told it was out of order.
As for
the comments Steven Gerrard made on ITV about the incident he was only saying what everyone was thinking. He is the leader, the captain of the team and that role doesn’t just exist on the pitch. I believe that Steven was trying to do was back up Henderson. Steven won’t be there next year, Balotelli may not be there next year, but Henderson will and he is likely to be captain. It was an attempt to protect Henderson more than a dig at Balotelli in my book.
Of course, the other big story of the week was also about penalty. Well, a dive to be honest. Wayne Rooney’s winning of a penalty against Preston was, to me, a definite dive. I was doing the game for TV in Qatar and my colleagues on the night Trevor Francis and Glenn Hoddle thought it was a penalty but I didn’t.
I thought it was poor from Wayne Rooney, I thought it was a dive and the referee got it completely wrong. He won the penalty, it was professional cheating.
Now, I was involved in a well-known non-penalty penalty issue. When Robbie Fowler was awarded one against Arsenal in 1997 he famously tried to warn the ref that it shouldn’t have been a penalty.
The difference in Robbie’s case was that he didn’t dive. In fact, he was touched by David Seaman as he went past him but Robbie just felt the level of contact wasn’t enough to justify a penalty. He simply fell over in the act of jumping over Seaman.
Of course, Robbie took it, it was saved and I tapped in the rebound. So I was involved, but only in a secondary phase. Robbie gets all the praise for his honesty.
As for Rooney, if you play with him you’ll be applauding him but if you were on the opposition you’d call him a cheat. That’s the way the game works.
