In the great pantheon of Arsene Wenger euphemisms, the “dark yellow” card is surely the greatest. It is up there with playing football with the handbrake on, looking little bit jaded and, of course, not seeing the incident, his favourite form of coquettish rhetorical evasion. The “dark yellow” is a new term, however, coined after Saturday’s close-fought win over Swansea City. It was Wenger’s suggestion for the imagined punishment which should have been handed out to Granit Xhaka, who was in fact show a full-blown red for distilling the sum total of human cynicism into a tackle midway through the second half.
While Wenger couldn’t help but laugh at his own neologism, laced as it was with inadvertent self-parody, his droll interpretation of the situation was brilliantly fitting and fairly apt. Xhaka’s tackle on Modou Barrow was neither uncontrolled nor particularly brutal, and could only be described as denying a goalscoring opportunity in the most tenuous sense. It was not deserving of a red card, so much as it was deserving of a caution, a no-nonsense talking to and general societal disapproval. This is where the “dark yellow” comes in; a card which acts not only as a warning, but also as a form of profound social taboo.
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Xhaka’s tackle was, without a doubt, extremely poor sportsmanship. On the one hand, it was the sort of challenge one might see towards the end of a Sunday League match, when a puffed-out, chain-smoking, thirtysomething centre-back is promptly skinned by the resident teenage prodigy, only to deliver a no-fucks-given chop to his ankles and send him sprawling face first in the sucking, wet mud. From an aesthetic perspective, it was a philistine’s tackle; an affront to the beautiful game in its total ugliness. From a tactical perspective, though, it was magnificent; a thing of such exquisite deliberation that one has to recognise Xhaka as a certain sort of genius, if not exactly a man with an impeccable sense of right and wrong.
While we will not go as far as to encourage this sort of behaviour, we must at least express a grudging admiration for Xhaka here. The tackle is oddly exquisite, in that it is the action of a footballer whose first priority is to stop another person playing football. It was unscrupulous and dishonourable but, ultimately, it stopped Swansea from breaking up the pitch when they had a two man advantage. As such, it is everything the English football fan wants from a defensive midfielder: a brazen, honest show of rule breaking, which adheres to an alternative code of fairness in that it is so obviously and blatantly unfair.
The thing is, Xhaka was not trying to deceive Jon Moss here. He was openly and flagrantly flaunting the rules of football, and inviting the referee to punish him accordingly. Moss broke the unspoken code of in-game cynicism by going all vigilante on him, and handing out a straight red card. Xhaka now faces a three-match ban and, considering how often people have called for Arsenal to be ‘nastier’ in recent years, his shameless approach to taking one for the team will be sorely missed.
