A pint of frothy ale, mistakenly grabbed by the toughest guy in the pub. The wrong child from nursery. Someone else's suitcase at the airport carousel. Who hasn't accidentally picked up something that wasn't theirs and regretted it later? However, few have done so as publicly as Tyrone Mings, who, in front of 23,466 mostly delighted spectators at the Jan Breydel Stadion, made the critical error of picking up the ball after a short goal kick was nudged his way by Aston Villa goalkeeper Emi Martínez during their Bigger Cup match against Club Brugge.
While Football Daily can only speculate about what was going through the skipper's mind as he leaned over, picked up the ball, and placed it on the edge of the six-yard box, we have a good idea of what his manager, Unai Emery, was thinking when the referee awarded the home side a penalty for handball. Emery's expression ranged from bewilderment to withering contempt and finally settled on pure fury. Already on a yellow card in his Bigger Cup debut, Mings was inexplicably spared a second booking for what can be generously described as a brain freeze, but the Belgians' captain, Hans Vanaken, scored from the spot and won the game thanks to the defender's absent-mindedness.
As funny as it was, it was hard not to empathize with Mings, who was making only his second appearance after 14 months out with a serious knee injury, a period so long that he apparently forgot the rules of the game he plays for a living. "It is a very, very strange mistake, but it's football," sighed Emery, whose side are still comfortably placed in the very long group stage table. "We have to forget it quickly. It's the biggest mistake I have witnessed in my career. This mistake is not going to happen again for a long time – I don't think in my lifetime."
Then again, it's an error that has already happened twice in one German second division match this season, while Mings's blunder was almost an exact replica of an incident in which Arsenal defender Gabriel picked up the ball from a goal kick nudged his way by David Raya against Bayern Munich last season. On that occasion, Gabriel's embarrassment was spared, with the referee subsequently telling Bayern's manager that he wasn't going to punish what he viewed as "a kid's mistake". And while the decision to award Brugge a penalty prompted some pearl-clutching over "the spirit of the game", as masters of the dark arts of time-wasting and extreme faffery when it comes to dawdling over goal kicks, on balance it can be argued Villa probably deserved their licks on this occasion.
While the Mings mishap was the first recorded foul of its kind in the history of football that Arsenal got away with and another team was punished for, Gunners fans were given their own reasons to gripe later in the evening when they were denied a stonewall spot kick before conceding what looked an extremely harsh one in their defeat at Inter. "We were extremely harshly done," fumed Mikel Arteta, with some justification, after a game that could have gone either way despite the home side having just one shot on target: their penalty. "These are the margins in this game so it's very hard to accept. There's nothing unfortunately that we can do and we're not going to be able to change it." With a daunting Premier League assignment at Chelsea looming this weekend, the Arsenal manager may also want to voice his annoyance at some of his stars' noticeably weak performances.
Join Will Unwin from 5.45pm GMT for hot Big Vase minute-by-minute updates from Galatasaray 1-2 Tottenham, while Scott Murray will then be on deck for Manchester United 2-0 PAOK at 8pm.
"Four days before the final, Daniel Levy called us all together to announce that, with the support of a sponsor, we would each receive a luxury aviator watch from the club. At first, we were excited to see the elegant boxes. Then we opened them and discovered he'd had the back of each timepiece engraved with the player's name and 'Champions League Finalist 2019'. 'Finalist'. Who does such a thing at a moment like this? I still haven't got over it, and I'm not alone." – Hugo Lloris gets some Spurs-related things off his chest in extracts from his new book.
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