There were three incidents in the Premiership highlighted on television the weekend before last, which gave rise to interesting reactions from all the managers concerned.
In two of the incidents the player involved was sent off by the referee and in the third, he would have been if
he had only been seen by the referee. In that last case everyone agreed that the player should have been shown the red card, whereas in the first incident opposing managers had directly opposing views, whilst at the other game, both managers felt the player was unlucky to get sent off.
The first case was El-Hadji Diouf spitting in the face of Portsmouth's Arjun De Zeeuw, not seen by the referee but caught on television. Despite what the scriptwriters of television's Little Britain might think, spitting is not funny. Spitting is the only direct free kick offence that is automatically a sending-off. I was delighted to see that Bolton manager, Sam Allardyce, didn't wait for the FA to act but as soon as he saw the television evidence, immediately fined the player.
In the second incident, Steve McClaren, manager of Middlesborough, might have wished he had waited until he watched the television replay before haranguing the referee as
he left the field at half time. If you didn't see it, we are talking about Franck Queudrue's two-footed lunge, at Tottenham's Noe Pamarot. McClaren said, 'It was a rash tackle, a bad tackle but there had hardly been a challenge before that. The referee could have cooled everything down with a yellow card'.
Martin Jol, the Tottenham manager, thought the opposite. 'It was cynical and straight on Pamarot's feet. He could have finished in hospital. It was a deserved red card'.
We had the benefit of the television replay and McClaren might well have been unsighted and not seen the result of the tackle, but that is no excuse. The law says, 'a direct free kick is awarded if a player kicks or attempts to kick an opponent,' so even if he had missed Pamarot, it would have still been an offence.
Unlike spitting, kicking an opponent is not a mandatory sending-off offence. It becomes one when in the opinion of the referee, it is committed with excessive force, intending to hurt or injure an opponent. That's what referee Phil Dowd thought and few neutrals would disagree.
In the other incident, David O'Leary, manager of
the dismissed player, disagreed with the sending off, as did, perhaps surprisingly, the opposing manager Kevin Kegan. Lee Hendrie of Aston Villa had a face to face flare-up with Manchester City's Danny Mills and then appeared to head-butt him. I say appeared, because another camera angle showed that he didn't actually make contact. This was the basis of David O'Leary's request to the referee, Mike Riley, to rescind the red card.
Head-butting is of course a form of striking, and like kicking, the laws say 'to strike or attempt to strike'. Apparently when it was put to Mike Riley that no contact had been made, he was reported to have said 'he may not have struck him but I am treating it as an attempt'. Some might think that it looked more like a pretend head-butt rather than an attempted one but it was still a provocative thing to do.
What about spitting: is an attempt as bad as the real thing? In a way, yes. The law doesn't say 'spits or attempts to spit,' but what it does say is 'A player is sent off if he spits at an opponent or any other person'.
'Spits at.' So he doesn't have to register a hit to be an offence.
There is an old saying, 'a miss is as good as a mile' but when it comes to football offences 'a miss can be as bad as a hit'.
Dick
Sawdon Smith