When the punishment doesn't fit the crime

YOU think I make you angry with what I write sometimes.

Try having a look at Tony Cascarino's column in the The Times.

Remember him?

He plied his footballing talents for such noted purveyors of quality footy, such as Gillingham and Millwall, Chelsea in our Vinny Jones bruiser period, Marseille, Nancy and Jack Charlton's Ireland.

There was nothing Nancy about the striker's football, but since his retirement he has done very well as a columnist and radio summariser.

But he got my goat this week when discussing the Ryan Shawcross tackle which nigh on snapped one of Aaron Ramsey's legs in half.

'I don't even think that the tackle deserved a red card,' Cascarino wrote in The Games on Monday.

What a load of baloney.

Yet, his is not a lone view and that saddens me no end.

Several times this week I have encountered football fans who share Cascarino's viewpoint and considered that there was nothing wrong with the tackle. It was mistimed, that's all, was their theme.

Such bad tackles is a subject close to my heart, and own tibia and fibula, for that matter.

I know what it's like to be on the wrong end of 'only a slightly late tackle'.

I'll spare you my horror story, but let me confirm having your leg snapped in half does not half hurt. It often causes life-changing problems, or can do.

Ask some older Vale Rec folk about their young Irish lad Alan Graham, and you will hear a real footballing horror story.

So that is why Arsene Wenger is dead right when he says that those who commit these X-rated tackles, intentional or not, should have the book thrown at them.

Swap the three games with three months I say, then players might start getting the message that there is a serious downside to blindly following the orders of a coach hell-bent on winning at all costs.

While I don't go along with Wenger's paranoid thoughts about his team being bullied, I agree with him that there is no place for a tackle whereby the foot leaves the ground.

Because it is those, studs-up variety, that causes the serious leg breaks.

Yet, in the UK – and I'm afraid still here – there are old-school football folk who see nothing wrong with a little bit of what they would call roughing up of the opposition, getting in their faces, hitting them where it hurts, showing them who is boss.

These people might have a different view though if they had been on the receiving end of a double leg break, accidental or not.

Shawcross did not, I am sure, go out to break Ramsey's leg, but at the same time he should face serious consequences for CAUSING the accident.

He was tackling without due care and attention, or even carelessness.

Such cases are no different to traffic accidents.

I may not have intentionally caused a pile up and serious injury to another driver by cutting a corner, distracted by changing a CD etc, but the likelihood is that the police will conclude I caused the accident and I will be fined very heavily dependent on how negligent I was.

As punishment, the Stoke defender will only sit out three games, because football's statute book says that's what you get for a red card. But it should be a lot more.

Football needs to follow the rugby example and treat these serious fouls with punishments that fit the crime.

Ramsey may never play again to the same level, he may never play again, full stop.

But, sadly, these horror stories will carry on happening as coaches ask their players to give them everything, throw their bodies on the line, smash the opposition, destroy the true art of football.