SFA can't dive for cover

Sunday 11 December 2011

TWO wrongs don't make a right.

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Billy Dodds

That is the main reason why I think the SFA fast-track panel reached the correct outcome when they upheld compliance officer Vincent Lunny's decision to ban Sone Aluko for two games.

But the SFA have blown it big time. Their procedures to combat diving are in chaos and it is the governing body who have brought it about. If they were consistent in the way they are trying to stamp out blatant diving, right from the beginning of the season and the Garry O'Connor incident against St Johnstone, they wouldn't be in this situation now. How the panel made the decision to reverse O'Connor's ban is beyond me.

The SFA are doing a lot of things that are correct, such as going with the fast-track system, but they have set themselves back years with all this. There is so much politics in there.O'Connor's dive was as blatant as you could get and I am angry just thinking about it because it was the best chance the SFA could have hoped for if they had wanted to put down a marker, and they didn't do it.I am a former striker, and I want divers to be absolutely hammered, but I have always been of the opinion that what people call minimal contact can be enough to cause a penalty or free-kick. Why should defenders get away with it, when you are about to score a goal from six yards or so, and they've maybe had a wee tug of your shirt, and just spun you a little bit to put you off balance? The referee will miss it if you don't show him you are getting tugged.It can be a fine line but no-one can tell me that the contact on Aluko was enough to make him go down. There's no jersey being tugged, he's not being pushed off balance; all Martin Hardie has done is rest his hand on his arm. People get touched like that in the box all the time. You can't stick up for him or O'Connor. You have to look at every situation in isolation but these two were easy to call for me.However, I can see why Rangers challenged the ban, because they thought the SFA had let O'Connor off with it so why not Aluko? I don't think they would have touched it with a barge pole if the SFA hadn't acted like they did. They would have just accepted it, and the unambig-uous message would have been sent out that blatant divers will be punished.Losing Aluko is a blow, because he has been a source of creativity, and people will look at it now and say that if the referee had seen it, it would have been a yellow card, so how can it be the equivalent of 12 yellow cards now? But for blatant cheats I think you have got to set up a deterrent, some sort of punishment to try to stop it. Diving has been around for years but Scotland is still a country where we have not had too much of it. We get it on the rare occasion and we have had two incidents in the last couple of months, but just to maintain that standard, we have got to lay down a marker.The verdict would have been easier for Ally McCoist to accept if the panel was made up of real football people. Everyone has an opinion but it gives you a head start if you have at least worked in the professional game. I don't mind former referee Jim McCluskey having his say but the SFA made a big deal about separating the professional from the grass-roots game so it seems strange Aluko's fate should come down to a representative from schools football and the chairman of Threave Rovers. Everybody has to take responsibility to stop diving. The players need to take more responsibility not to go down blatantly in the first place. And the SFA have to take responsibility to punish it straight away. But the people that don't seem to get punished are the referees. Stevie O'Reilly got demoted to the First Division for one game after the huge mistake in the match between Inverness and Celtic but he was back for the Hearts game the next week, so where is the punishment there? Steve Conroy was referee for both the O'Connor and the Aluko incidents, and I heard Jackie McNamara saying there had also been a similar incident in a match between Partick and Dundee.Now Dunfermline manager Jim McIntyre is appealing against his ban for criticising the referee's decision, because he is getting punished for saying something which has effectively been proven to be correct. But it was the SFA who started the snowball rolling. I can't emphasise enough how big a blunder it was to let O'Connor off. They could have made it easy for themselves.

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SFA can't dive for cover

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