“Apologies from my end, it was never a penalty – genuinely thought defender was going to slide, so tried to ride the tackle,” he later tweeted, after fans took to social media to call him every name under the sun.
The word used within the FA, though, was “catalyst”. It is to prevent “Robert Snodgrass situations” that the game’s rule makers have been formulating a process that they hope will reverse the trend of more and more simulation in the English game.
When the player himself admits a penalty has been wrongly awarded, they reasoned, something simply had to be done.
A similar system to the one passed by the FA Council yesterday has already been trialled all this season in Scotland where, anecdotally at least, it has been considered a success.
The extra wrinkle the better-resourced English FA have been able to add is that they can fast-track the process to ensure that retrospective action is taken before the player is next due to return to the field of play.
Largely the move has been welcomed, although there are obvious limitations. Being forced to miss games against Tottenham and West Ham may have inconvenienced Snodgrass and Hull, but the resulting 3-3 draw robbed Palace of two points and contributed to Alan Pardew losing his job two weeks later.
Replacement Sam Allardyce was still dealing with the outfall last Sunday when Hull were finally seen off in a relegation battle that Palace might have climbed away from weeks ago had that penalty not been given.
He is also concerned about players who are legitimately fouled in the area only to find themselves wrongly booked for cheating.
Consequently, in his usual forthright manner, he believes these rules offer no real consolation to the genuinely injured party.
“Rubbish, it’s utter rubbish,” he snorted. “What about the lad that gets booked that didn’t dive? What are they going to do with that? They’re going to say that’s unlucky, next time we’ll try and get that right. You’ll then have to reverse that somehow.
“So bring technology in, let us look at it on the day and then bring a sin bin in so we can put him in that for 10 minutes and then put him back on.
“And let’s stop paying all these people money to do rubbish situations in the game. That’s utter rubbish.”
Unlike for unseen incidents when the panels consist entirely of former match officials, the people getting paid in this instance are a former player and a former manager as well as an ex-referee.
The margins are fine and open to different interpretations and, just a week after the Snodgrass incident, Tottenham’s Dele Alli offered an insight of how tempting it is to cheat following his own brush – or rather, otherwise – with Swansea’s Kyle Naughton.
“I think it’s down to the ref to make a decision at the end of the day,” stopping some way short of remorse. “I’m not going to lie – I’m a competitive player – I think there’s no point playing football if you’re not competitive and you don’t want to win games.”
Alli’s manager Mauricio Pochettino described him as “a little bit naughty” and traditionally in Hispanic countries players have been applauded in such instances for helping their team by pulling the wool over the eyes of the referee.
It is by no means a new phenomenon, however, and England players in the past have certainly not been as far above suspicion as they might like.
Hanging on the wall of Pochettino’s office in Tottenham’s state-of-the-art training complex is a picture of the infamous World Cup clash between Argentina and England in Sapporo in 2002, when Michael Owen fell over the former defender’s leg to earn the penalty which David Beckham converted for the only goal of the game.
“Michael Owen signed it,” Pochettino revealed just last week. “Maybe one day I will show you what he wrote. ‘Definitely: ‘You didn’t touch me’!”
There may be flaws in the new regulations but at least the FA should be applauded for making justice more public – and more timely – than that.
