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Wayne
Rooney will not be punished by The Football Association despite television
replays clearly showing that the England international caught Wigan midfielder
with his elbow on Saturday.
As
Rooney ran past McCarthy the striker seemed to deliberately hit the Wigan man
in the face, leading to referee Mark Clattenburg giving a free kick. He did
not, though, give a red, or even yellow, card.
Because
Clattenburg ‘dealt’ with the incident during the match, English football’s
governing body cannot act as they believe it will undermine the officials, as
The Press Association explains:
“The
disciplinary process is complex in the sense that the FA are not allowed by
FIFA to take further action on incidents already dealt with by the referee.
In
addition, world football's governing body frowns upon the idea that referees
could go into a game believing they have a ‘get-out’ of trial by video, as is
the case in both codes of rugby, where Rooney would almost certainly have been
cited given the severity of the incident.”
The
FA have decided that retrospective punishment will not be taken as Clattenburg
has told them that he feels he administrated appropriate action at the time,
basically leading The FA powerless.
Professional
Game Match Officials general manager Mike Riley said: "Match officials are
trained to prioritise following the ball, as that's where the greater majority
of incidents are going to take place. However, we also do a lot of work around
the area of peripheral vision to be aware of anything that might potentially
happen off the ball."
He
added: "In this incident Mark was following play but caught sight of two
players coming together and he awarded a free-kick because he believed one
player had impeded the other.
"We
should be clear that Mark did nothing wrong in officiating this incident as he
acted on what he saw on the pitch."
While
this decision does show consistency (if The FA were to punish Rooney and
therefore use him as an example, there would be similar outrage to that of now
because they did not persecute Ben Thatcher or Steven Gerrard, who have been
involved in similar incidents in the last few years) there is a clear
indication that the rule regarding retrospective punishment needs to change.
With
the advances in technology that the game has experienced, or, rather, ignored,
over the years, surely some sort of implementation of video evidence should be
at least taken into consideration?
Rooney
is now free to face Chelsea tomorrow night as United go into a vital period of
their season, with Liverpool and possibly Arsenal coming up in the next few
weeks, as well as Marseille in the Champions League. Sir Alex Ferguson should
count himself lucky that one of his most influential players, at his best, is
still available for selection.
This article
originally appeared on sports website Sports Haze but is now unavailable due to
the site closing down.
Picture from cwe_expressible_everything
