SOCCER:ALEX McLEISH last night accused the Football Association of giving "bigger clubs" preferential treatment when deciding whether to take disciplinary action against players.
“We’re looking for fairness,” said the Birmingham City manager. “We’re not defending anybody if they have made a bad decision on the field. But we’re looking for fairness. If it’s going to be the smaller clubs that are scrutinised, then you’ve got to look at the bigger clubs as well.”
The Scot made his comments as he prepared to lose Lee Bowyer for at least three matches after television footage showed the midfielder stamping on Bacary Sagna’s right leg and raking his studs down the defender’s achilles in two separate incidents during Arsenal’s 3-0 victory on Saturday.
The FA is set to charge Bowyer with violent conduct today after Peter Walton, the referee at St Andrew’s, confirmed he missed both offences. Bowyer seems certain to receive a three-match ban for stamping on Sagna, and the suspension could be doubled if Walton also deems the second challenge worthy of a straight red card. The latter scenario, however, seems unlikely, according to FA sources.
Although McLeish refused to discuss the incidents involving Bowyer because he felt it was “inappropriate” before the FA announced its verdict, the Birmingham manager made it clear he will not defend the indefensible. He did, however, express serious misgivings about how the FA uses “trial by television” and cited an incident involving Alan Hutton at St Andrew’s last month, when the Tottenham Hotspur defender apparently head-butted Birmingham’s David Murphy but escaped any retrospective punishment, to support his argument that the governing body was not treating every club in the same way.
“I’ll give you an example,” he said. “Alan Hutton – I never said anything about this after the game – head-butted one of our players a few weeks ago on the touchline and there was nothing done about that. In fact, Match of the Day 2 laughed about it and called him a little bull, saying it was the way a bull would head-butt somebody. They had a good laugh about it.
“But ours is a big furore: ‘Bowyer has got to get done’. We didn’t hear anybody screaming about Alan Hutton that day. And Alan came into the dressing room and apologised to David Murphy for it after the game. I was quite happy just to let it be swept under the carpet. I could have come out at the time and said: ‘Why’s he not being done?’ I don’t like to see trial by television, but if we are getting tried by television, then everyone has got to get tried by television.”
Birmingham expect Bowyer to receive a three-match ban and will encourage him to accept a violent conduct charge at the earliest opportunity so that he can serve his suspension immediately – he would miss the game at Blackpool tonight, the FA Cup tie against Millwall on Saturday and the League Cup semi-final first leg at West Ham United the following Tuesday – and return for the Premier League game against Aston Villa on Sunday week.
Bowyer has been a magnet to controversy throughout his career and has the dubious honour of being the most booked player of all time in the Premier League with 98 cautions to his name, but McLeish said the 34-year-old has generally been well behaved at St Andrew’s. “You know in a split second something can happen on the pitch and a player can see red,” said McLeish, who felt Samir Nasri should have been sanctioned for a “bad tackle” on Stephen Carr on Saturday. “But Bowyer has been pretty mature in his time with us. I’ve not had any problems.”
An FA spokesman said last night: “The FA apply retrospective action only to incidents that are deemed off the ball and have clearly not been seen by the referee. The application of this is consistent to all incidents that are brought to our attention.”
