Duran Duran – Wild Boy walks (See what I did there…?) | OneFootball

This is the second in an occasional series on ‘why it was a red card’ (the first having been why Virgil van Dijk should have been sent off earlier this month against NUFC), here’s my take on the Jhon Duran incident.

First thing one should probably point out, is that ‘Jhon’ isn’t a misspelling, deliberate or otherwise, but an actual thing. A very uncommon variant of the ever popular ‘John’ but an actual variant, nevertheless. Just thought I’d clear that one up.

The Jhon Duran sending off has the expected polarisation from the vested parties.

Aston Villa fans believed this the most egregious of travesties and that an appeal would bring them justice, victory and an end to jokes about West Midlands accents (which I quite like, actually).

Toon fans, on the other hand, feel that Duran should be locked in a cargo container with Dan Burn, a phone book and a coat hanger and left overnight in there, such was the severity of his assault on poor Fabian Schar.

If you want the truth in such cases, you really do have to ignore the POV of the teams involved. We’re football fans and cannot be trusted to give anything remotely resembling a balanced analysis.

So, we can look to ‘the neutral’ to get to the bottom of the issue. The neutral will provide us with an unbiased take on the event.

Well, no, probably not. How many of us are really neutral? We all have our little biases. I can’t stand Spurs fans for example and am never really neutral when they play, despite being able to claim to be. But I suppose it is possible to get some kind of unbiased analysis – maybe from those with professional standards to adhere to. I do, of course, refer to that most noble body – the ‘Sports Journalist’!

What? Eh? Oh…!

Well. Let’s just look at what people other than Toon and Villa fans are reporting and hope it makes some sense, then.

The main ‘defence’ for Jhon Duran seems to be that it all looked awful in slow motion.

Newsflash! It didn’t look great at normal speed either.

This brings us onto the crux of the matter which is ‘Intent’.

Those who believe this an injustice claim that there’s no intent in Duran’s action. This can be misleading though. If you decide to practice your flying superman punch on the pitch and another player gets in the way you’re off. You may not have intended it but you’re still walking.

So, could Duran have done anything else in the circumstance? Was the result the only course of action he could have taken

According to MoTD pundits –Shearer included here – Jhon Duran was powerless to avoid standing on Fabian Schar because of his twisted ankle! I must admit, love you Alan, but this was utter cobblers. If that’s the extent of your forensic examination of the incident, then god help us. This just made no sense – like physically, anatomically and logically. If anything, getting a painful twist to your ankle on a tackle is more likely to illicit an aggressive reaction! The suggested mechanics of it were just all wrong and I thought it was an attempt at showing balance from Alan Shearer. Had Duran stayed on and got a hat-trick, I wonder if the analysis from Wor Al would have stood?

Yeah, me too.

If you’re looking for evidence them I could point you towards a stroppy, petulant young man angry at not being allowed to take a free-kick moments before the sending off, or to a similar presentation of aggressive petulance after the dismissal that was aimed at a poor innocent water bottle.

So what actually happened? Well, my ten pence is this.

I think Jhon Duran got well tackled and saw an opportunity to hurt the guy who’d done it in a way that he imagined would go unpunished. He thought he could get away with it in the tangle of limbs so he let his boots go walking over Fabien Schar’s back.

What’s interesting, I think, is that he should have got away with it but didn’t.

A yellow would really have been the right call as it’s difficult to call it as deliberate and doing so has led to an outcry of ‘he’s innocent, bless him!’

But he’s not innocent. He tried to hurt his man and got caught out.

The anger afterwards was about him not being allowed to get away with it, not that it was an injustice. He knew what he was doing.

Essentially, he thought that he could appear to be innocent so he attempted to hurt another player. I hate it when I see our guys do it and I hate it when I see the oppo do it, too.

If he’d got a yellow we may have seen an outcry after the game about how he should have seen red.

We’d have still beat them.

This brings me to the bit that annoys me most.

Duran’s sending off was a distraction from our dominant performance. It gives Villa fans a readymade excuse to avoid the fact that our man outthought their man again, and our team outplayed their team again.

You can debate the whys and wherefores of the dismissal ‘til the proverbial cows come home but it won’t detract from the fact that the better team won.

Claims that Villa were on top before the sending off are wide of the mark. Villa had more of the ball and that counts for nothing against us. They’d got a standard level save from Dubravka (the Quiet Man) from a free-kick. And that’s it.