Fair Play!

I read in the paper recently that local referees had agreed to be a little more lenient with players who break the rules. I personally remarked on the performance of referee Adrian McCourt in our game away to Limavady, who seemed reluctant to caution anybody, even though there were many transgressions by both sets of players, he kept his yellow and red cards in his pocket. But this leniency doesn’t seem to have had much effect, as 13 players attached to Premier league clubs, began one and two match bans from Monday past. Ballymena had two players falling into this category, top scorer Kevin Kelbie and fringe player Gordon Simms. Kelbie will be badly missed by United tonight at Larne, as he is averaging a goal every two games, even though he has failed to find the target in the last five. Though I, as a United fan am disappointed that Kelbie isn’t playing, I realise at the same time that justice is not only being done, but its being seen to be done. Players have to be responsible for their actions and should be punished by the teams as well as by the authorities. Too many times we have witnessed players, like Mickey Collins and Packy McAllister, deliberately trying to injure other players, if these incidents were not condoned by their respective clubs, perhaps we’d witness less of them. That in my opinion is a much better way to go about reducing the number of suspensions. If we can stamp out the violent play, then referees won’t have to caution as many players. Whereas if we are more lenient, the ‘dirty players’ will just take advantage of our leniency and push it to the limit. I do realise that football is a contact sport and sometimes tackles are mistimed which leads to an inevitable caution, but that is unavoidable. I can’t stand ‘nicey nicey’ football anyway, as it’s a ‘mans game’ and one must expect some rough and tumble. But the line must be drawn, when its rough for the sake of being rough, its time to get the yellow cards out and get back to playing the game!