In recent years, several trainers in the Eredivisie were caught instructing their goalkeeper to lie down, simulate an injury and thereby stop the game, after which the trainer called his group of players to make tactical changes. Henk Fraser makes no secret of the fact that he used that trick after Sparta Rotterdam’s victory over Go Ahead Eagles (1-0). The KNVB calls the time of goalkeepers ‘not desirable’.
The football association states that it is looking ‘in a general sense’ at what can be done about it, it writes General Newspaper Tuesday. The action of Maduka Okoye during the game against Go Ahead, after about 25 minutes, will not be specifically investigated, a spokesperson said. It is in fact up to the FIFA Rules of the Game Committee to possibly change rules. That is not what the KNVB is about.
For Ronald Waterreus it is more like pure cheating than a genius move. “As high as I have Fraser as a person and trainer; You just shouldn’t want this,” emphasizes the former goalkeeper in the newspaper. “Play spoilage is one of the most annoying things about football for viewers. Only: as long as there are no adequate regulations, you will continue to see these kinds of practices.”
Supervision of game spoilage in the broadest sense of the word should emphatically belong to the range of tasks of the VAR, emphasizes Waterreus. “If the VAR sees that Lisandro Martínez is trying to give an opponent a yellow card for the umpteenth time, the VAR should be given the opportunity to tell the referee that it is Martínez that gets that yellow card. And the same should apply to those plays with the goalkeepers.”
“If it can be proven in the least that they are cheating, the VAR should be able to intervene.” Mike Snoei, on behalf of ESPN present as an analyst during Sparta – Go Ahead, sees more in a different solution. “Each coach should be able to use one time-out per match, in which he can dot the i’s and cross the t’s. Then you might prevent trainers from creatively forcing such a time-out.”
Fraser more or less admitted to playing a game last weekend. “We are Dutch. I am proud to be fifty-fifty Surinamese. But we are very good at finding the loopholes in the law. It is not up to me to change that. You could of course influence it. People can say that they think I am very unsportsmanlike, I think that’s fine and I understand that. I have to survive, we have to survive as Sparta. A lot is allowed in sport and love.”