This post is the second and final part to this post

Beach ball 1-0 Football

Liverpool may be the only team in the world that came back in the Champions League final after falling behind by three clean goals, the only team that lost the league twice by one point in favour of the same opponent, and the only team that did not award at least two penalty kicks during the European Championship final against Seville in 2016. But before all of that, Liverpool were the only team to lose a football match because of a beach ball!

In October 2009, Benitez's Liverpool was preparing to leave for the Stadium of Light in Sunderland in search of a positive result, after losing three of the first eight matches in favour of Chelsea, Tottenham and Aston Villa.

The start of their opponent, Sunderland, was also not ideal, as they lost three matches as well, but they managed to win four matches and draw with Manchester United at Old Trafford, and after only 5 minutes had passed, they had scored the strangest goal ever in the history of the Premier League.

A corner was played from the left of Spanish goalkeeper Pepe Reina, to be reversed by Andy Reid to Darren Bent, who decided to move away from the six-yard area, then hit the ball directly at a large red beach ball that had infiltrated the field, to change its direction and deceive Reina and all of Liverpool's defence before it entered the goal.

Logically, any referee in half of his mental strength would have counted a drop between two players of the two teams and cancelled the goal, but Mike Jones, the referee of the arena, decided to count it as a goal, justifying his decision that “it could have collided with one of the players of the two teams in the box and entered the goal in the same way.” It was probably the first and last time that an arbitral award was made based on what could have happened, rather than what actually happened.

Of course, Jones fell back to refereeing in the second division or the Championship, and surprisingly, Sunderland won with only this goal despite their players sweeping Liverpool in performance throughout the 90 minutes, hitting the crossbar and the posts more than once, so much so that this strange goal was not the biggest problem for Benitez when he criticized his team's performance after the match.

The strangest was the reaction of Darren Bent himself, who set out to celebrate and did not care about the strangeness of the goal at all, as if the match was actually taking place on the beach! Ten years later, he told Sky:

I didn't hit the ball in the best way, but I knew it would go to the goal, then it hit the beach ball and entered. At that time, I was not surprised or thinking about what happened, I said to myself: it went into the goal, then I went to celebrate as if nothing had happened!

The moral of the story; This is an illegal goal and had it not been for Mike Jones counting it, I wouldn't need to remind you

Don't skin the sheep

Normally, advice like making sure the goal is counted first before celebrating would have been self-evident, but that advice becomes doubly important when you know that yellow cards players receive for illegal celebrations, such as shirt removal or celebrations of a political nature, are not cancelled if the goal was illegal

The legal justification for FIFA here is that the effect has occurred and that similar celebrations violate the game’s order, its spirit, and its image in front of the world, and therefore the player is punished for it, regardless of the legitimacy of the goal. Imagine getting a warning for an illegal celebration of a goal that was not counted.

The legal colour of the underwear

For the same reason that prompts the referees to distinguish between the players' clothing in all its parts, shirt, shorts and socks, they must also wear underwear of a certain colour, which is exactly the same colour as the pants.

The legal justification for this rule is the same as the rule for the colours of shirts, and all of this revolves around the idea of ​​justice in the game, as the similarity of colours confuses players and may prompt one of them to pass to the opponent, assuming he was playing in his underwear, for example.

This means that Mirko Vučinić broke the law twice when he took off his pants the first time after scoring Montenegro's goal against Switzerland during the Euro 2012 qualifier; Once because he took it off, and once because the colour of his underpants did not match the outside, which he apparently learned from when he took off his pants for the second time after scoring the winning goal for Juventus against Pescara in 2013.

Conclusion

This concludes the series. I hope some of these rules were fun to ready. Let me know if there are any other rules that should be added here.