Did you get it?
Adrian was given a straight red card for his waist-high studs-up challenge on Leicester’s Jamie Vardy in 2015 and his appeal was rejected while Simon Francis escaped with a yellow card for a studs-up challenge on Cheik Kouyate’s face and he will face no retrospective review under the current FA rulebook.
Inconsistency like that is inexcusable.
Nice one Sean. ‘Did you get it?’ Indeed, got it.
Bournemouth’s third goal from an offside position was a poor refereeing decision without doubt. The consequences are severe with immediate and potential longer term damage to our cause. What is truly amazing is the BBC MotD commentator who immediately leapt to the defence of Francis by suggesting that Cheiku was to blame in part by ‘leaning his body into’ the incoming studs raised boot. Watching the replays of the incident the Bournemouth player follows through towards Kouyate’s face, who was pulling his body away instinctively. The amazing piece of seemingly unconscious bias in the commentary language – akin to ‘I didn’t glass him Guv’nor, he leaned his face into my drinking vessel!’ – was later bettered by the punditry team of Murphy et al who considered the Kouyate and Obiang incidents benign. What was their evidence for making this claim? Zilch.
An aside: had the studs raised boot follow-through been inflicted on a white Bournemouth player from an Irons player of colour, say Kouyate or Obiang, I wonder about the invective that would have poured out of the MotD commentator’s mouth along the lines of dangerous, risky and unprofessional conduct.
Back to the punditry of the MotD possee. This was beyond belief.
How on earth could these Guys make a judgement call claiming there was no wilful intent in the physical incidents involving Kouyate and Obiang? Too much Christmas booze, methinks. Or perhaps they are auditioning for a Specsavers ad on TV. How on earth would studio armchair pundits ‘know’ what going on in the minds of two Bournemouth players intent on getting a Boxing Day result while seeing the points slipping away from them? Bobby Madley’s decisions were flakey to say the least.
Sean, you point to the inconsistency issue very pithily. I appreciate your observation, both why and how you make it. And you may also be insinuating something else here; that there ‘maybe’ an agenda to be particularly unflinching in doling out disciplinary penalties to Hammers players. Anybody could be forgiven for thinking along those lines this season.
With respect to your point, what is equally worrying (it seems to me) is the poor professional judgement of Bobby Madley’s decisions. Was he trying to exploit a large TV audience to show his bosses that he can make an independent judgement call no matter what the pressure around him? We simply cannot ‘know’ what Madley’s motives or intentions were in overruling his assistant; we can only see in the hard evidence of camera capture, Mr Madley’s appalling misjudgements that have dire consequences for us. The FA needs to be taken to task over the use of video footage in ‘real time’. And they need to launch an inquiry into Mr Madley’s performance, as well as the matter of inconsistency across the decisions of PL officials this season.