Five games is harsh for a case of trampling without due care
BACK in 2004, I was among the first players in English football given a retrospective ban based on TV evidence.
I served a three-match suspension for elbowing Chelsea’s Mateja Kezman – although I will swear to my dying day it wasn’t intentional and would happily take a lie detector test to prove it.
But I don’t completely buy Tyrone Mings’ protest that he did not mean to trample on Zlatan Ibrahimovic’s head last weekend, which earned him a retrospective five-match ban.
And the disciplinary tribunal’s decision that it was deliberate opened a massive can of worms because they have decreed Mings’ action was laced with intent.
The Bournemouth defender issued a statement, insisting it was an “accidental collision” and that stepping on a fellow professional’s head is “not part of my game.”
OK, I accept Mings did not set out to stamp on Ibrahimovic – there was no acceleration of his foot, in a downward motion, that made it look like premeditated violence.
But in my experience, if your foot is in danger of connecting with an opponent’s head, you find a way to pull out of the challenge at all costs. You collapse your leg, change direction, tilt your ankle through 45 degrees, do everything possible to avoid contact between boot and head, because it is potentially one of the most damaging forms of collision in the game.
That applies whether you are kicking a ball around the garden with your kids, playing Sunday parks football or in the Premier League.
And if you do tread on someone’s head, you can’t ignore it. Surely it’s human nature to stop and wonder if you have hurt them?
If Zlatan gets a threematch ban for elbowing Mings (right) at a corner which followed shortly after – which did look like intentional – I would agree with Bournemouth manager Eddie Howe that five games in the sin bin for Mings is harsh.
We are setting out down a very dangerous road if panels can make assumptions of intent when the only person on the planet who truly knows whether Mings meant to step on Zlatan’s head is Mings himself.
As much as we laughed off Ibrahimovic’s claim that Mings jumped into his elbow, how can we actually prove otherwise?
But on the other hand, if I was lying on the floor and a 6ft 5in defender planted his boot on my head, I would probably go looking for him and give him a whack.
I would call Mings’ actions trampling without due care for the well-being of a fellow professional. If five games was harsh, he shouldn’t be let off scotfree, either.
What I’m not having is the old chestnut that he’s “not that type of player” – one of the biggest cop-outs in football. Bournemouth said in a statement Mings had only been booked 13 times in 75 appearances, and not at all since April 2015, before his close encounter with Zlatan.
Nice try. Mings has barely played for two years because of serious injury. It’s not easy to get booked when you don’t play. And his rate of yellow cards, about one every five or six games, is similar to my strike rate of about 115 in 631 matches – so if Mings is an angel, that makes two of us. Like I said, intent is incredibly difficult to prove or disprove, as I found out 13 years ago, playing for Birmingham against Chelsea – whose new manager was Jose Mourinho.
I was marking Kezman and swung my arm behind me, to hold him off and stand my ground. Absolutely no violent intent. Unfortunately for me, I caught him in the face and I got that ban even though I can honestly say, 100 per cent, I didn’t mean it.
Mourinho referred to me only as the “blond guy” in his post-match interviews, but it started a sequence of events which led to my ban.
Which is worse, being elbowed in the face or trampled on the head? Of course, neither is acceptable.
I still shudder at the damage John Fashanu’s elbow did to Gary Mabbutt’s face about 30 years ago, and I still argue natural instincts will always take over if you are about to tread on someone’s head.
If I was still playing and had trodden on Zlatan, or if Joey Barton had done it, there would have been outrage.
Not that type of player? Joey and I would have been hammered because of our reputations.
But I know trampling on people’s heads is not my type of challenge.