by Hoop Blah »
19 Oct 2012 13:57
gazzer, loyal royal the FA is being a bit hypocritical here. Saying we'll boycott Serbia in future matches straight away, but it took forever to ban John Terry. Nothing done about Sordell claiming he's been racially abused at Millwall. Lazio fined £30,000 for racism, while Bendtner is fined £80,000 for showing branded pants. Where are the priorities?
The FA couldn't do anything about Terry until legal proceedings had been completed. Nothing they could do about that really. They've dealt with the tribunal excellently in my view. They could easily have hidden behind the courts decision and said there wasn't enough evidence for the tribunal to go against the legal findings. That's what a lot of people expected, and they were under a lot of pressure from Terry and his legal team to drop the tribunal because of whatever rule it was they quoted but they stood firm and held him to account.
That is positive stuff from the FA if you ask me. They've not hidden from taking action and the tribunal they appointed have come to what I consider to be the right findings. They've even made it clear that they did what they did because they didn't believe the weak defence Chelsea, Terry and Cole put forward.
I'm not sure what's happening with the Sordell incident though as I've not read anything about it.
The UEFA fines for Lazio and Bendtner are out of the hands of the FA, and UEFA are an odd organisation at times anyway. I don't think you can really compare the two fines anyway because one is for a commercial arrangement and so had to be large enough to ensure the player didn't make money from breaching the rules or their wouldn't have been a deterrent for next time. Companies pay silly amounts for sponsorship of these major events. That money filters down to all sorts of parts of the game and if that sponsorship is devalued by ambush marketing then the sport suffers in the long run.
Should clubs and nations be hit harder for their fans misbehaviour? Probably yes. What more could Lazio do to control their away fans behaviour at another clubs ground? One could argue they couldn't do a lot. I'd still argue in favour of substantially bigger fines though.