It seems everyone has something to say about Nick Pope’s red card against Liverpool with most people feeling bad for the Newcastle United goalkeeper, but former striker, Chris Sutton has taken a different view.
The rules need changing
Speaking on the Monday Night Club on 5 Live Sport, Chris Sutton, along with Rory Smith and host, Mark Chapman got into the debate around the sending off and subsequent suspension of Newcastle’s number one, with Rory Smith gloriously mounting his high horse to poke holes in the current rules: “Nick Pope absolutely should miss the Carabao Cup final because those are the rules. The rules themselves are ridiculous.”
What he’s alluding to here is the lack of consistency in how suspensions are applied across competitions, in that red card suspensions apply to all competitions but suspensions picked up from an accumulation of yellow cards only apply to the competition in which they were received.
As the debate went on, Mark Champan made a mention of it being “unlucky” which caused Chris Sutton to chime in with: “It was not unlucky. It was a terrible decision, just sheer panic. Goalkeepers cannot be trusted other than Ederson, coming out like that.”
It’s all in the reflexes
It is certainly a broad statement, poorly worded, but he does have a point. Goalkeepers are conditioned to use their hands, it’s their job and it is drilled into them day-in day-out in training, so when they come out of their box they have to fight every instinct to not use their hands, and with Pope, he’d already made one error by coming that far out, another by going for the ball with his head, and then as soon as the ball hit his hand, his instincts took over.
The trio then discussed whether there’s a moment of hesitation from Newcastle’s £10m man which was responsible for him not beating Mo Salah to the ball, and if, had he just committed and not made that slight pause, would he have beaten Salah and thus avoided the whole thing.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing, and I’m sure Nick Pope has gone over every millisecond of his decision making a thousand times already.
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