RoyalBlue How we can end up being charged with failing to control our players and Warncock gets off scot free is beyond me.
Because a fair few of them piled in to the dug-out to have their say! That's pretty simple, not even the *cough* 'governing body' could ignore that scrap.
Ian Royal SpaceCruiser "Pushed over" is rather a bit strong. It was a mere shove that didn't send Warnock sprawling to the floor. Rolling Eyes
I still think that there is a cause and effect. If Warnock hadn't made that gesture about stamping, Downes might not have reacted like he did.
Still, the FA was correct to charge Downes, but to let Warnock off is a bit wrong. If he didn't do anything wrong, why was he sent to the stands?
In which case Hunt is guilty of Gillespie elbowing him, because if he'd been meek and backed away rather than standing up to Gillespie when he charged at him then Gillespie would never have elbowed him.
Trying to make SpaceCruiser see your side of the argument? A brave man...
(Even Warnock agreed that sending him to the stands in order to calm things down was the right thing to do)
On the other hand, this is an interesting article about Colin. Hadn't seen any of the breaking legs comments from the Mad Stad, this does suggest that Wally was understandably upset rather than "a drunk uncle at a wedding" as one quote put it.
Spacey might have trouble though, if he goes with what the aricle says he might have to accept that Arsenal should have been better protected at Colin's place which would imply that some Frenchmen were hard done by. Tough'un and no mistake!
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0, ... 48,00.html
Why football can happily live without Warnock's brand of Sheffield steel
Martin Samuel, Sports Writer of the Year
And so Neil Warnock sails on. The four-match suspended sentence that hangs over him this season is unlikely to be triggered by any Football Association action after the angry scenes in the match against Reading on Saturday. The Sheffield United manager is increasingly painted as the innocent victim of a misunderstanding, while Reading and their coach, Wally Downes, are in the dock, as is Keith Gillespie, the Sheffield United winger, who was sent off as fast as is possible without defying the laws of physics.
And because we are nothing if not masters of the obvious, we will continue to look at what happened at the Madejski Stadium and not why it happened or why it continues to happen so many times around the manager of Sheffield United.
Gillespie, a substitute, was shown a red card, rightly, for striking Stephen Hunt before the ball had re-entered play, so his official time on the pitch is documented as zero seconds. Yet it seems that nobody within Soho Square cares to wonder what the mood might have been on the Sheffield United bench before the incident, or what Warnock might have said to Gillespie, what words of encouragement and motivation he used to fire up a player whose first act on taking the field was to hit an opponent in the face without waiting for the game to restart.
When John Hollins was manager of Chelsea in the 1980s, he had an abysmal relationship with the press. It was a time when Ken Bates, then the Chelsea chairman, and the newspapers were sniping at each other constantly and the manager was caught in the crossfire. Hollins received harsher treatment than he deserved, collateral damage in the battle with Bates, and the hostilities meant that to support the club, he, too, had to behave in a confrontational manner, which was plainly not his style.
Yet when writers moaned about the objectionable, two-faced so-and-so in the manager’s chair at Stamford Bridge, those in football would invariably respond with a quizzical look. According to just about everybody, Hollins was a thoroughly decent man: genial, charming, generous to a fault. The fair conclusion was that they could not all be wrong. So it is with Warnock.
There are those on this side of the fence who see him as a bit of a character, ruffling the feathers of pretension in the Premiership and mostly harmless. Speak to a disproportionate number of his contemporaries, however, and they will boil their feelings down to one word. You will find it in Chaucer. And they can’t all be wrong this time, either.
When Downes invaded the opposition’s technical area to confront Warnock, he did so in the belief that, by miming an exaggerated stamping action, the Sheffield United manager was giving his team a direction to hurt Reading’s players. Warnock strongly denies this and may have found an ally in Mark Halsey, the referee. But even if Downes was mistaken, there are mitigating circumstances.
Warnock has previous in this field; plenty of it. The accusation that has followed him to the Premiership and is at the root of his unpopularity is that he tells his players to break legs. Largely, this is grapevine talk. A manager will relay an anecdote in private without wishing to see it published; but in May 2003, Steve Bull, MBE, the former England striker, broke the omertà and drew a remarkable confession from Warnock.
Bull claimed that, during his playing days with Wolverhampton Wanderers, Warnock had shouted to members of his Notts County team to break Bull’s legs. Warnock’s response in The Sun was startling. “I must have said that a hundred times in my career,â€
