On Soccer: The decision by Alan Kelly to send Paul McAreavey off during last week's Setanta Cup game between Shelbourne and Linfield may have been surprising but referees make mistakes, it's the nature of the game.

What remains altogether more baffling is the fact that an organisation like Fifa insists that a player in a situation like his be suspended for at least one game when television pictures established beyond doubt that he has done nothing wrong.

Worse from McAreavey's point of view was the fact that David Crawley escaped any sort punishment for the high challenge that prompted the Northerner's angry exchange with the Shelbourne defender in the first place. Kelly's mistake, though, was an honest one and errors like it will remain a regular part of the game as long as one man is relied upon to make the instant calls.

What is both foolish and unjust is the fact that in an age when McAreavey's innocence can be reliably established within a matter of seconds, he is nevertheless penalised again a week or more later, as he was last night by being obliged to watch from the sidelines as the Irish League champions took on Derry City at the Brandywell.

The man principally responsible for this is Sepp Blatter who personally championed a system whereby a sending off automatically results in a suspension with the only grounds for appeal considered being that of mistaken identity.

Blatter justified his stand on the basis that the rule would "protect the reputation of the game," and, "the authority of the referee". In fact, of course, it does the opposite of both by providing for the punishment of those known to be innocent.

The English FA, to its credit, initially refused to implement the rule and only did so for the start of the 2004/05 season after FIFA threatened to impose sanctions upon it. Eighteen months on the regulation is a regular source of irritation and bewilderment throughout the game as players, managers and supporters who have grown used to the idea that a referee may rescind a yellow card after reviewing video evidence has no such discretion in the case of the higher sanction.

There has been the occasional act of rebellion by local associations such as last October in Spain when a red card shown to David Beckham during a game between Real Madrid and Valencia was quashed by an appeal board which found that the dissent for which the player was initially booked and his applause when the referee produced a yellow card was all, in effect, part of the same offence. Fifa, though, has tended to take umbrage in such cases, threatening to overrule local organisation in the pursuit of uniformity.

Initiatives on improving the game tend to come to World Cup years with referees instructed to clamp down on tackles from behind prior to France '98 and to book those they believed to have dived during the 2002 tournament but with less than three months to go to the start of this year's competition it appears that the opportunity has, on this occasion, been lost. Indeed, it may yet take some belligerent player or club resorting to court action over an incident like the one involving McAreavey to spur Fifa into shifting its position.

In the event that Fifa was to act, a valid concern here in Ireland might be that we would see a two-tier system of justice emerge with a firm division developing between televised and non-televised games, even between those covered with many cameras from multiple angles and the sort of situation we have grown used to here where highlights of questionable quality are provided by from a single position.

Managers might not want their games to be screened if they thought that incidents would be reviewed subsequently with the possibility that retrospective sanctions would be imposed while rivals were not subjected to the same sort of scrutiny.

It is through televised games more than anything, though, that young players learn and form their attitudes to the game. If those in charge are not seen to draw a firm distinction between right and wrong in the most widely seen and closely scrutinised of matches then there can be little hope of persuading those further down the tree that they should respect the laws, never mind the spirit in which football is played.