Which to punish cause or effect?

REFEREEING should be easy.

Let’s face it there are only 17 laws to learn and administer but sometimes, incidents happen that test decision making to the full.

Look at the recent Leeds v Liverpool match and the injury to teen-age Liverpool midfielder Harvey Elliott.

If you saw the match on television , you will have seen how Leeds player Pascal

Struijk challenged for the ball, which was at Elliott’s feet.

Basically, Struijk going in the same direction of Elliott, put his foot across him and ‘stole’ the ball.

The sort of challenge, though tough, is not usually punished.

The referee, first of all, allowed play to continue.

He probably didn’t realise immediately the seriousness of Elliott’s injury and didn’t seem to consider that a foul had been committed, so wasn’t playing an advantage.

In fact the laws of the Game say that a referee should not apply ‘advantage’ in situations involving serious play, unless there is a clear opportunity to score a goal.

It was only when he recognised that Elliott was not rolling about in fake agony that he immediately stopped the game and went over to him, only being beaten to him by the physio.

Seeing the extent of Elliott’s injury, the referee then showed Struijk a red card.

The question here is, for what offence? Of the eight sending off offences, the only one that could be used is serious foul play, which the law says is a tackle or challenge which endangers the safety of an opponent or uses excessive force or brutality.

It describes this as ‘lunging at an opponent in challenging for the ball, from the front. side or from behind’.

I think we can dismiss the use of excessive force or lunging as we know it. We are then left with a tackle or challenge, which endangers the safety of an opponent.

But it was the severity of the injury rather than the tackle that was punished.

There can be no doubt that without Struijk’s challenge Elliott would not have suffered the dislocated ankle.

But was it, as Harvey Elliott himself described it afterwards, ‘just a freak accident’.