[jambutty]

Two wrongs never make a right but it ain’t half satisfying when you react to a wrong even if it is with another wrong.

The real culprit is FIFA and the other football authorities. They only pay lip service to punishing transgressions and also tend to be selective. They holler foul against other teams but are strangely silent on their own.

The referees also need to be stricter with the laws of the game but then they always have the excuse that they didn’t see what goes on and if they cannot see an offence they cannot punish it, which is fair enough. The assistant referee can only watch from one viewpoint so maybe we should have 4 assistant referees to cover all angles. Of course this could cause conflict in off side decisions where one AR flags for off side and his counterpart does not. But problems are there to be solved not ignored and I’m sure that there would be an answer to that particular problem if the will were there.

There is only one way to stamp out the cheating and waving imaginary cards at the referee that goes on and that is to punish the culprit there and then by inviting them to spend a while in a ‘Sin Bin’ even if it means several players. They would soon stop if they lost the services of three players for ten minutes. A yellow card is meaningless in that the eventual punishment does not favour the victim (the current opponents) but some other team in the future.

Any offence that warrants a yellow card should be met with some time off the field of play like in Rugby and Ice Hockey. You don’t see much dissention in either and when on the odd occasion you do there is another candidate for the ‘Sin Bin’. Two ‘Sin Bins’ for one player in a match equals a red card. If a goal is scored against a team with a player or players in the ‘Sin Bin’ it automatically ends their sentence. I would suggest a 10 minutes spell in the ‘Sin Bin’ controlled by the fourth official.

We may well end up with a 7 playing 9 match for a while but it will make managers and players sit up and take notice and think twice before committing a foul worthy of a yellow card.

People will argue that they attend a match to watch 11 players take on 11 but we don’t attend to watch players foul each other. We want to watch a game where the skills of playing football are displayed not shirt or arm pulling or hacking at legs or trying to get a player sent off.

It is time that the various football authorities took real steps to clean up the game.