When Stuart Pearce finally woke up to the fact that there was no defence to the grievous bodily harm his man Ben Thatcher had inflicted on Pedro Mendes on Wednesday night, he used a most inappropriate phrase to try to convey his man’s mindset.
“Ben honestly feels as though this is a massive wake-up call to him,” said the Manchester City manager. “Just to look at him in the eye and his ashen face shows he knows this is not acceptable.”
We wait to see what punishment the Football Association, and maybe a court of law, hand to Thatcher. We wait to hear when Mendes, now recovering in Portugal after his seizure on the pitch where Thatcher’s forearm smash dumped him, is allowed by neurologists to resume training.
And if the FA’s punishment is not sufficiently serious — say a three-month ban or a nine-match suspension — Thatcher might have chilling cause to wallow in his own self-pity. History shows that recourse to real law is hit or miss. Proving intent is the devil of a job, especially before a judge or jury who might have little idea of the pace of the professional game or the force of a fit man throwing his bodyweight behind an assault.
Yet from records compiled by Edward Grayson, the London barrister whose life’s work centred on his study of sport and the law, there have been convictions in British courts for soccer violence, even for manslaughter, since 1878.
More to the point, much more recent and telling, the sport itself has acknowledged there can be no hiding place for one professional to threaten the life, limb or livelihood of a fellow pro on the pitch.
Before a ball was kicked at this summer’s World Cup, Sepp Blatter, the president of the world governing body Fifa, called upon the referees to “drive out this new devil, the use of the elbow as a weapon in football”.
It isn’t so new. Thatcher has “previous”, as everybody has been reminding him since Wednesday by showing pictures of his raised elbow, his gnarled expression, as he brutally fouled Nicky Summerbee during his days as a Wimbledon left-back.
Some apologists for Wimbledon FC — the old so-called Crazy Gang — will be aware that Thatcher’s adrenaline rushes, had their precedents. John Fashanu went before him at Wimbledon, and “Fash the Bash” as he became known may well have been fortunate that Gary Mabbutt, the Tottenham Hotspur captain, chose not to seek legal redress after Fashanu’s elbow shattered Mabbutt’s cheek bone, and splintered the eye socket into three sections.
One intriguing aside to that “collision” in November 1993 was that the referee who did not send off Fashanu that sorry night was Keith Hackett. “The question of intent,” Hackett later said after viewing the playback, “remains questionable”.
Hackett is now the paid overseer to our Premiership referees. He dutifully relieved Dermot Gallagher, the ref who only saw Thatcher’s violence as a yellow card, from active service at Bristol Rovers this weekend. “I sank back in my chair,” said Hackett of Gallagher opting out of a red card. “I knew full well that most people who love our game abhor that type of challenge.”
Hackett added that he did not sleep easily on Wednesday because of concern for Mendes who by then was under neurological surveillance in Manchester Royal Infirmary.
“Quite honestly,” added Hackett, “the man in the television van has 26 angles of video, and that isn’t there for the officials on the pitch. However, a challenge of that nature has to be detected by one of the four match officials, who are wired up and can talk to one another.”
In which case, we might ask, why was Gallagher, alone, dropped from action this weekend? His method of refereeing has always leaned towards passivity and he is liked by managers and players for trying to keep 22 players on the field.
Yet when Glen Johnson rushed towards the fallen Mendes on Wednesday, when he and other Portsmouth players realised that their colleague was unconscious and in need of oxygen, the shock of that assault mercifully numbed them and prevented retaliatory aggression.
“To be honest,” said Gary O’Neil, the Portsmouth midfield player, “all we could think of was asking the ref what he was going to do about the tackle. We don’t have many hot heads in the team, but what shocked us was that it was only a yellow card. If the ref had said he didn’t see the incident, we could have accepted it. But to give a yellow for that is not right.”
The FA would like to use video at the side of the pitch in such matters. Fifa rejects that, though many of us who were in Berlin during the World Cup final suspect that the head butt for which Zinedine Zidane was sent off was seen not by the referee in the middle, but by the fourth official on a TV monitor.
It matters little that Fifa dispute that. What did count was that in the tournament after Blatter’s call for instant dismissal for deliberate use of the elbow, Italy’s Daniele de Rossi and Holland’s Khalid Boulahrouz were red carded for the “new” crime in the game.
On the other hand, Chelsea have just imported Boulahrouz, presumably because Jose Mourinho saw and admired his performance against his own country Portugal at the World Cup. Boulahrouz would seem to most of us to be not the kind of import the Premiership needs — his nickname is Cannibal, and in that same match where he elbowed Luis Figo he had earlier implanted his studs twice into the upper thigh of Cristiano Ronaldo.
So the insidious use of the elbow as well as the boot seems to be almost admired within the moneyed Premiership which, at Chelsea’s level, can have the pick of virtually any talents they wish to buy.
Gordon Taylor, the chief executive of the PFA, the players’ union, repeated last week that “it’s not just football, it’s the law of the land” in relation to the licence some players feel they have to flirt with what Blatter calls the devil.
His union should be called to the conference Blatter will hold later this year in Berlin between coaches and administrators in search of common ground to improve communication in the game.
In the bulging files that the PFA presumably hold is the evidence that if football will not police its own fields responsibly, the law will attempt to do that for them.
In 1992, a year before the Fashanu-Mabbutt affair, one pro footballer pressed charges against another at Salisbury Crown Court. John Uzzell, a Torquay United defender who like Mabbutt needed reconstruction on an eye socket to save his sight, was living on benefit. He gave evidence that Gary Blissett, of Brentford FC, ended his career and almost blinded him by reckless use of the elbow.
The jury of eight men and four women watched a video recording, but acquitted Blissett of the charge of grievous bodily harm.
The jurors may or may not have known the forces at play in a football match. But one crucial witness at the trial, Graham Kelly the then chief executive of the FA, described it as an “entirely reasonable challenge. If I go to four matches a week, I probably see 200 such challenges”.
Since then Fifa has led the way. Players such as Ryan Giggs and Patrick Kluivert have received bans for allegedly deliberate use of the elbow.
And still it goes on. Still Harry Redknapp can observe that the national sport cannot be seen to condone violence of this nature, and must not show children TV footage of vicious assaults that would not be tolerated in the High Street. Yesterday there was more, with two players sent off at The Valley, one from each of Charlton and Bolton, for the aggressive use of an elbow.
If and when the Greater Manchester police file a case against Thatcher — a player who might have challenged for the England left-back shirt had he been the master of his temper — we will know where the law stands.
