Tyrone Mings made a “a kid’s mistake” and Thomas Tuchel will be furious. The Aston Villa star really didn’t need reminding that football can be a pr*ck sometimes.
Mings could probably have done with me on hand to deliver the advice I repeated to my toddler on more than a dozen occasions in the park this morning as I encourage (force) her into football as a pastime, perhaps without the term of endearment, though the centre-back could surely do with some love as he reflects on his blunder in Aston Villa’s Champions League defeat to Club Brugge. “Not with your hands, sweetheart.”
As the referee told Thomas Tuchel after Bayern Munich’s 2-2 draw with Arsenal last season, it was “a kid’s mistake”.
“He’s played for England, I don’t think the Champions League will faze him,” said Peter Crouch in the studio, unwittingly jinxing Mings ahead of his first ever European game and just his second start since tearing his cruciate ligament in the opening game of last season. The poor b*astard looked dejected as he trudged from the field in the 66th minute.
Crouch also echoed our thoughts and we assume those of the vast majority when he explained how pleased he was to see Mings back in action.
Having played his part in bringing Villa up from the Championship and slogging it through some fallow seasons in the Premier League, Mings was key to their upturn when Unai Emery replaced Steven Gerrard and was in and around the England team before missing Villa’s outstanding 2023/2024 season and a European Championship he would have had an excellent chance of being a part of.
He is the last footballer that needed reminding that football can be a real pr*ck sometimes.
It’s the kind of letter-of-the-law decision that will boil (and evidently already has boiled) Emery’s blood, and one that may have been shrugged off by the Club Brugge players and their manager despite their appeals as a common sense call. But Emery and Villa can point to a precedent for the decision from last season’s Champions League.
Arsenal weren’t punished the Gabriel made exactly the same blunder against Bayern Munich, with Thomas Tuchel told by the referee after the game that he wasn’t going to punish what he viewed as “a kid’s mistake”.
Emiliano Martinez put the ball down in his six-yard box and passed it to Mings, who picked it up. For some reason – we can only put it down to a brain fart – Mings didn’t think Martinez had taken the goal-kick despite his goalkeeper very clearly taking the goal-kick, having taken the same goal-kick on multiple occasions in the same game, with Mings standing in that position in order to receive the goal-kick.
Funny? Absolutely. But we wouldn’t wish a moment like that – which has very little to do with football or the merits of one team over the other – on many footballers, certainly not Mings given what he’s been through, and particularly as it was the decisive goal of the game.
Emery was furious on the touchline, we assume not at Mings specifically or even the referee but at his team as a whole. They’ve dropped their first points in the Champions League and although they lost in bizarre fashion didn’t deserve anything from the game in any case. They had one shot on target to Club Brugge’s seven and failed to get anything going while their hosts consistently threatened.
It’s the Belgian side’s first win over Premier League opposition since the 1994/1995 season as Villa fell to their third consecutive defeat in all competitions.
Emery’s side remain very well placed to qualify automatically for the Champions League knockouts but will need to play a whole lot better to make further strides both in Europe and in the Premier League. We can only hope that in order to rediscover their form they’re not required to go back to the most basic of all basics that Mings momentarily, cruelly and hilariously forgot on Wednesday.
