Glenn Gibbons: Current simulation laws rightly protect innocent

IN FOOTBALL, as in other walks of life, laws are framed to protect as well as prosecute. Through the week-long clamour for “justice” that was the feature of the fall-out from the Sone Aluko affair, too many commentators rushed into righteous tub-thumping without making the distinction.

Predictably, too, some of the misguided pronouncements came from former professionals, a body that seems for the past few years to have been as industrious as a colony of ants in the business of building a reputation for ill-considered punditry. While nobody expects the great majority of ex-players or managers to demonstrate the statesmanship of Abraham Lincoln, one or two have conscientiously cultivated an image of cool intelligence that could cause viewers, listeners and readers to expect better.

Pat Nevin, for example, boasts credentials that include five years as chairman of the Professional Footballers Association in England, a position that would have exposed him to the long-serving and greatly experienced Gordon Taylor. It should have been sufficient to infuse the former winger with an awareness of the wisdom of examining the pros, cons and possible ramifications of significant issues before casting an opinion in public.

Instead, he was at the head of the queue of those hastily advocating a change in the present legislation, one that would see players who are caught in the act of attempting to dupe a referee into making an incorrect decision issued with an on-the-spot red card.

Nevin’s (and others’) claim that such punitive action would soon lower the rate of simulation among would-be offenders may or may not prove to be sound, but it fails to address the possibility of a referee wrongfully dismissing an innocent man. If, as the Aluko case and others before it proves, a match official can erroneously reward a cheat, he is surely just as capable of a misjudgment that victimises the guiltless.

In such instances, there is no appeal, because an ordering-off cannot be undone after the fact. Of course, the consequences of injudiciously rewarding a player for cheating – as with Aluko – are equally unalterable, but there remains a mechanism for (backdated) disciplinary measures.

If a referee does hold a player to be guilty of attempted deception, a free kick is awarded to the latter’s opponents and the offender is punished, quite properly, with a yellow card. No serious damage is done, the potential for a miscarriage of justice is avoided and the protection of the possibly innocent is preserved.

The Dunfermline chairman, John Yorkston, in addition, exhibited an alarmingly narrow view of another significant aspect of the business: he wondered why an offence that carries only a caution when detected at the time becomes effectively a dismissal and a two-match suspension when culpability is established retrospectively.

Only a short period of pondering the nature of the kind of incident that prompts an indictment by the Scottish FA’s compliance officer should have been sufficient to put an end to his bewilderment. The successful cheat is rewarded with the possibly match-changing wrong decision into which he has conned the referee (in Aluko’s case, a converted penalty kick) and the consequences of his behaviour, therefore, automatically becomes appreciably more serious. The “sentence”, upgraded from a caution to a two-match suspension, is, naturally, adjusted to fit the crime.

There was also a certain naivete among the many who wondered why Aluko and Rangers did not accept the compliance officer’s offer of a ban. Instead, the player and the club decided to take the matter to the independent tribunal, when the bulk of observers (certainly outside Ibrox) seemed to agree that the odds against his acquittal should be expressed in five figures.

They appeared not to have realised that, had Aluko accepted the punishment without presenting a defence, it would have amounted to an admission of culpability and, by extension, he could have been perceived as guilty of perjury during his vehement post-match denials of diving.