Hazard and the ballboy

[Richinns]

As much as I dislike Chelsea the ballboy deserved to get a kick! Lay on the ball and to time waste and stop play. Hazard was only trying to get the ball back to the keeper quickly and the little sh1t decided not to allow this. If he was doing his job it would not have happened!

[AustrianAndyGull]

Both at fault but Hazard inexcusable, he is a responsible adult apparently. Tell the ball boy that there has to be consequences to his actions however immature and that he can never ballboy at Swansea again and tell Hazard that you can't go around kicking minors and give him an extra 3 match ban on top of the 3 for the dismissal. Hopefully each party will learn that they can't go around doing things like this without appropriate punishment. Maybe if our justice system AND chav parents held a similar view then the UK wouldn't be swamped with absolute degenerates.

This is a prime example of people jumping to defend the child like angry parents at a school who kick off at the teachers because they can't accept that their kids' behaviour was unacceptable. They are saying things like,"if it was my kid i would get the police involved". No, do your job properly as a responsible parent and seek an apology from the player ( and a free shirt! ) and also issue an apology from your son, then leave it at that.

[oldpedant]

Apparently, he is the son of the main shareholder and director at Swansea City, and bragged on twitter beforehand how he was 'needed' to waste time.
http://metro.co.uk/2013/01/24/swansea-b ... s-3364904/

What I'm surprised about is that no-one is criticising the referee for allowing the blatant time-wasting by the Swansea players and all of the ball-boys. I know it's considered to be part of the home advantage, and they were winning etc., but they were taking the p*ss yesterday.

[happytorq]

time wasting is one the things in football that annoys me most. The game is supposed to be 90 minutes long but I bet if you were to watch a game with a stopwatch and pause it every time the ball went out of play, the total playing time would be closer to 70 minutes. even throw ins seem to take 20-30 seconds (and don't get me started on where the throw-in actually gets taken from!)

if it were up to me (and many of you are no doubt happy that it is not!) I would have a master timekeeper upstairs somewhere. take that out of the referee's hands. that way we'd also get rid of the 'additional time' thing which is entirely arbitrary and seems have to no bearing on the actual stoppages.

[Yellow4life]

The referee has no power of the amount of time taken for a ball boy to retain the ball for it to go back in play. The way round this is to order a new ball from the 4th official or add on more time which the ball boy has wasted.