Lazio vs Roma on Eurosport
The website that brings you the news as it happens: tonight’s big Serie A derby, Lazio-Roma, has been stopped for around 20 minutes now. The fans insisted by chanting, so the players stopped two minutes into the second half. Fans’ representatives (don’t ask me) came onto the pitch to explain that a fan had been injured by a police car. Ah, as I type, two contradictory things: the tannoy has announced that no one has been hurt at all; and the players are leaving the pitch as if the whole thing is over.
Anyway, two other less spectacular points around the coverage. Gary Richardson, astutely, during the interval: “Gravity affects the Inzaghi brothers differently from ordinary people.”
Less amusingly, there was an instance of another stupidity that is creeping in to commentators’ and pundits’ thinking, when Panucci was challenged and went down in the area. The ref gave nothing, and the commentator suggested that if he didn’t give a penalty, he had to book the player for diving! This is plainly nonsense – it’s obvious that players can go down during tackles or other challenges without there being a foul and without it being a dive to con the ref. This is surely not a difficult concept to grasp, is it?