Let the World Cup experiment commence...

You know a World Cup is on the horizon when football’s rule makers get the irresistible urge to tinker with the foundations of the sport.

Every tournament sees a fresh set of tweaks and experiments chucked into the mix by IFAB, all aimed at making football faster, fairer and more of a spectacle.

Sometimes these changes succeed, sometimes they simply make the game more complicated. And, on rare occasions, IFAB manages to somehow achieve both those things at once.

Which brings us neatly to the latest collection of changes unveiled in the last few days, just in time for next week’s big kick-off.

One of the good ones is that players being substituted will now have 10 seconds to get off the pitch, which should finally end that majestic dying-swan routine where the man coming off hobbles to the touchline like someone with lead kneecaps.

Even better, anyone treated on the pitch will have to stay off for a minute, which should reduce the number of players who collapse as if shot by a sniper, receive one squirt of magic spray, then immediately sprint 70 metres like Usain Bolt chasing a bus.

And the goalkeeper injury loophole is being targeted too. Quite right. We have all seen it: team under pressure, manager needs to reorganise, goalkeeper suddenly sits down clutching a part of his body he only discovered existed three seconds earlier. Everyone else gathers round the manager for a full tactical seminar while the keeper stares bravely into the middle distance, presumably preparing his Oscar speech.

Even more excitingly, they are extending the ‘8-second rule’ to throw-ins and goal kicks, which is an extremely welcome clamp down on time wasting. Take too long and your opponent gets the throw-in or a corner. Lovely. Up to that point, to be fair, IFAB were on a roll. Then they got to VAR.

Video referees will now have more power to intervene on second yellow cards, mistaken identity, wrongly awarded corners and fouls committed before the ball has come back in play. This sounds reasonable until you remember that VAR already struggles with things like “was that man punched in the face?” and “does an armpit count as a knee?”

Giving VAR more things to review is like fixing a traffic jam by adding more roundabouts. In theory, very clever. In practice, everyone ends up stationary, confused and quietly hating humanity.

The most worrying bit is VAR-ing corners. Football has survived for 150 years with the occasional wrongly awarded corner. It is part of the sport’s natural ecosystem, like bad throw-ins, questionable haircuts and England never winning anything. If every corner now needs a potential forensic inquiry, it could get very messy, very fast.

So yes, stop the time-wasting, stop the fake injuries, stop goalkeepers creating tactical timeouts. Those are for the good of the game.

But more power to VAR? That’s so not going to end well.

Tom’s all or nothing squad

Given everything else that has happened in the sporting world over the past couple of weeks, I almost forgot to talk about England’s World Cup squad.

Almost.

Normally Thomas Tuchel’s selection would have been the biggest football story of the week in my mind. But it’s almost like he got it out of the way while the rest of us were focussed on spygate, title races, relegation battlers, European finals and legendary managers walking off into the sunset.

The main words that come to mind when looking at his chosen 26 are ‘brave’ and ‘bold’. Much of his squad picks itself. But where he has had choices to make, he’s made some bloody controversial ones.

Leaving out Harry Maguire is a massive gamble considering he has never let England down, is relatively immune to major injuries and has just finished what was one of his best seasons in a Manchester United shirt.

Tournament football suits big Harry. Dan Burn, for all his admirable qualities, is simply not operating at the same level, while John Stones is made of porcelain and only played about half an hour’s football this season.

If England find themselves defending a one-goal lead in a World Cup semi-final, few supporters will be comforted by the knowledge that Maguire is watching from his sofa.

Tuchel apparently also decided there is no need to take any left-backs to a major tournament, with Luke Shaw and Lewis Hall, both in top form, not making the cut. Nico O’Reilly did get the nod, but calling him a left-back is like calling an iPhone a calculator – it’s one of the things it can do, but not what it’s best at.

However, it’s in midfield that Tuchel really upped the ante. Leaving out Phil Foden and Cole Palmer are both justifiable decisions, based on current form. But not picking men-of-the-moment Morgan Gibbs-White and Adam Wharton while finding a slot for 97-year-old Jordan Henderson is just ludicrous.

Henderson is apparently a great lad to have around, a good leader and someone the younger players can look to for help and advice. But he is only likely to play a couple of minutes here and there, if at all. So, if you are desperate to take him, take him as a coach, not a player.

And finding a seat on the plane for Ivan Toney is another move that just doesn’t sit comfortably. He may have scored a few and assisted a few more over the last season. But he’s playing in Saudi Arabia, where I could probably manage the occasional hat-trick.

None of this means Tuchel is wrong. In fact, he may be proved absolutely and categorically right come July 19.

The message appears to be simple: trust me, I know what I’m doing. If England win the World Cup, these decisions will be hailed as the work of a visionary manager willing to challenge conventional wisdom.

If they fall short, however, Tuchel will have nowhere to hide.

In an era obsessed with hype, social media and individual brands, Milner built a career on something far less glamorous: reliability

Solid

James Milner has retired from football. Or, to put it another way, one of the last remaining survivors from football’s analogue age has finally decided enough is enough.

Milner leaves the game after a remarkable 24-year top-flight career, having made more Premier League appearances than anyone else in history. He made his debut for Leeds United as a teenager and somehow kept going long enough to play alongside footballers who were not yet born when he first appeared in the competition.

The remarkable thing about Milner is that nobody ever seemed to get particularly excited about him.

He was never the quickest, never the flashiest and rarely the star attraction. Nobody bought a ticket specifically to watch Milner. Yet every manager wanted him.

In an era obsessed with hype, social media and individual brands, Milner built a career on something far less glamorous: reliability. If a team needed a right-back, left-back, midfielder or winger, Milner would do the job and do it well.

He approached football with all the pizzazz of someone organising their sock drawer, which is precisely why he lasted so long.

Every dressing room wants and needs a Milner but they are in very short supply.

The fact that he leaves the Premier League as its all-time appearance holder suggests there may be more intrinsic value in turning up every week and putting in a shift than there is in generating headlines.

E-mail: Jamescalvertmalta@gmail.com

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