Wednesday 4 February 2009

Violent Conduct Charge for Wright-Phillips!

Shaun Wright-Phillips has been charged for violent conduct
The charge relates to an incident involving Rory Delap in the first half of Man City's 1-0 defeat against Stoke on Saturday.

No action was taken at the time as referee Martin Atkinson did not see what happened, but video footage has now been studied.

Atkinson has informed the FA that he would have sent Wright-Phillips off if he had seen the incident.


Now he is likely to miss 3 games for this charge, if he doesn't win a appeal that must be submitted by Thursday 6pm. I have some issues here. Firstly the severity of his petulant kick is minimal. Delap reacted badly to a fair challenge by SWP and took him out and then preceded to take a deliberate kick at him. He was provoked and in a court of law, he would be dealt with less severely. The ban isn't in proportion to the incident, why does he get the same length ban as the original culprit. Surely Zab and Richards push on Delap afterwards is also counted as violent conduct, there is no consistency!












My next issue is why have the FA allowed the rules to be so flawed that they have let Bosingwa get away with an unprovoked kick on Benayoun.



I fail to see how they can let a player get away with this but give SWP a ban for a little kick in response to being kicked himself. It's not the 1st time the FA have ignored these incidents. It's just difficult to take, when a player committing a worse offence get lets off. Ronaldo too has been let off this season, with his petulant kick on Dawson, the FA decided to take no action. All we ask for is consistency and fairness.




* Good read here! Rick Turner from Bluemoon has written an article The Times Fanzone, a very amusing read!

On Sunday Supplement
Brian Woolnough, Paul Hayward, Neil Custis - it's hard to think of a more dour, miserable bunch of, well, bastards (I'm not sure if that's the correct collective noun for journalists, but it seems apt).

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