. The wrong child from nursery. Somebody’s else’s suitcase at the airport carousel. Who among us hasn’t picked something up by mistake and been forced to rue our error? However, few have done so as publicly as Tyrone Mings, who in front of 23,466 largely delighted attendees at the Jan Breydel Stadion, made the critical error of picking up the ball after a short goal kick had been prodded his way by Villa goalkeeper Emi Martínez during Aston Villa’s Bigger Cup match against Club Brugge. While Football Daily can only guess 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 fair idea what his manager was thinking when the ref proceeded to award the home side a penalty for handball. Unai Emery’s expression ran the gamut from bafflement, through withering contempt and finally settled on pure thunder.
Already on a yellow card in his Bigger Cup debut, Mings was inexplicably spared a second booking for what can charitably be described as his brain freeze, but the Belgians’ captain, Hans Vanaken, scored from the spot and won the game thanks to the defender’s act of absent-mindedness. As funny as it was, it was difficult not to empathise with Mings, making only his second appearance after 14 months on the sidelines with a serious knee injury, an absence so lengthy he apparently forgot the laws 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 very handily placed in the extremely 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 rick was almost an exact replica of an incident in …
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