I really don't want to get too serious on a thread like this; but that Joey Barton video underscores one of the problems with soccer ... oops, "football".
Barton comes up with a cheap shot ... didn't seem like much but the guy who took it went down like he'd been smoked across the pumpkin with a Louisville Slugger
... and he gets to walk off the field for chrissake. He wouldn't get off so lightly in hockey. And look at what happened with Suarez and Evra! Now, Evra looks like a sturdy lad, and in hockey he would have gone up to Suarez and drifted him a good one or two across the side of his head. But what did he end up doing? He refused to shake hands with him, or some dumb shiite like that. If Suarez had called Georges Laraque a nigger, he'd still have tweety birds circling his head.
Nothing wrong with a bit of one-on-one retalliation. (There are strict rules in hockey about being the third man in on a fight, and bench-clearing brawls are a no-no.) But I still believe that a good right cross would be a better deterrent to the chippy stuff that mars football than any number of colored cards. If you fans of the beautiful game watched some hockey, you would be surprised, not only at the quality of the reffing, but also at how few penalties are called.