SLOPPY RULE MAKES A FOOL OF MARRINER

THE British tax code stretches to 17,000 pages. You’d think that closes a lot of loopholes but it doesn’t. The more numbers and clauses and jargon, the more open it is to a super accountancy firm — the type employed by Amazon, Vodafone and Starbucks — driving a lorry around it. A lorry full of money, obviously. It is much the same with the Football Association’s rules on retrospective action. It is almost as if they have been left deliberately vague so you can clump somebody in the throat and get away with it. Whether Sergio Aguero will be suspended is to be discovered but Manchester City believe they have a good case for his defence centred on what referee Andre Marriner can reasonably claim to have seen. City say Marriner had a clear view of the incident, and can prove that using filmed evidence. They therefore claim it is disingenuous for the referee to say that he did not see Aguero’s clash with Winston Reid of West Ham. He did see it. He just got it wrong and there is no provision in the rulebook for human error. Bizarrely, in cases of violent conduct it is impossible for a referee to say he made a mistake or misjudged the severity of a foul. We’re not talking about re-refereeing the game here or revisiting every controversial call, just violent acts that are missed or misinterpreted. A simple rulebook clarification would allow Marriner to state that, yes, he did see the incident but he called it poorly. He did not regard Aguero’s assault to be as significant as it now looks on camera. Instead there is a loophole, because Marriner has to pretend he went temporarily blind. He didn’t. He messed up. But now he must dissemble to make the rulebook work.