This about sums it up for me....
Javier Mascherano wrong to ignore post-Cole warning
Martin Samuel, Chief Football Correspondent
The biggest lie to nail is the one about consistency. You will have heard it. Javier
Mascherano should not have been booked, and therefore sent off, on Sunday because last week, last month or last year another player from another club did the same and got away with it. This argument collapses with the revelation that referees do not arrive packaged in an Acme box like the entrapment devices in Road Runner cartoons but are that curious mixture of deoxyribonucleic acid that goes to make the bipedal primate known as man.
Men react to similar situations in different ways, which is why some let you in from a side road and others treat the slow emergence of your car as an affront to human civilisation. As every instance of dissent, each foul and any handball will be, in some small way, unique, there will always be the random factor of interpretation. Unless the Premier League wishes to divert much of its television bounty from the onerous duty of propping up the most falsely inflated market this side of the New England property bubble, to begin work on a programme aimed at inventing heartless cyborgs to take charge of future matches, we are stuck with referees selected from life that occurs naturally on this planet. Therefore, inconsistencies will arise.
Leaving entry-level biology aside, though, there is another reason why Steve Bennett was within his rights to book Mascherano at Old Trafford when he might not have contemplated the same action had the incident taken place a month earlier, and it will be instantly apparent to anyone who has either had children or been one (which, unless this cyborg production line is more of a goer than we think, we can presume is most of us).
Remember when you were at school and everyone was playing up in a lesson and the teacher would ask for quiet? Then he might have said it again, with more sternness. He may even have demanded it a third time, in a manner that suggested that he was on the cusp of losing the plot, with the threat that the next person who so much as whispered was going into detention. Well, you shut up then, didn't you?
And if you were the one who was so dumb that you carried on talking when even the nutters, the wild men, the ones who were going to leave at 16 for a fledgeling career in car crime and juvenile delinquency, knew to pipe down, you deserved everything that was coming your way. Not because that mumbled, smart aleck aside to your friend was so much worse than what had gone before, but because you were plain, slack-jawed stupid. You knew that the situation had changed, you knew the climate in which you were operating and you paid it no mind. That was Mascherano on Sunday.
Every parent has been in Bennett's shoes, too. “Guys, stop playing with a real football in the house, you'll break something.” Five minutes later. “Look, boys, I've told you once, get dressed and go outside if you want to play football. I'm not having it in here.” Five minutes more. “Is that the damn ball I can hear again? It better not be. I've told you twice now - if I see that thing in here again today, no Game Boy for a week.” Another five minutes, big thump against the wall. “Right, I warned you, Will, that's it, no Game Boy. But? But what? I don't care about Rob doing it. I didn't see him, Will, I saw you. You were told, both of you. I warned you.”
Recognise that? It might not be perfect parenting as endorsed by child psychologists, but it is instantly familiar as life as lived in millions of households everywhere, so its principles should not be too foreign for footballers to understand. There are basic rules (no games with real footballs in the house) and we try to apply them without being mirthlessly authoritarian (the genial, if firm, reminder stage), but if no one pays attention, there is usually a final notice (no Game Boy) and then the crackdown (give me that Game Boy).
Even if Mascherano or the management at his club were so blasé about the controversy over Ashley Cole's dissent to Mike Riley, the referee, during Chelsea's match against Tottenham Hotspur last week that they did not sense that the climate had changed, it is impossible to believe that Bennett did not talk to a senior representative of Manchester United and Liverpool at Old Trafford to tell them that respect for officials was high on the agenda.
At Stamford Bridge, before the match between Chelsea and Arsenal, Mark Clattenburg, the referee, could be seen spelling out the new dynamic to John Terry and William Gallas, the captains. His body language was immediately decipherable and, if Bennett was not as transparent in his intentions, his last act immediately before Mascherano's booking - he showed the yellow card to Fernando Torres, the Liverpool striker, for dissent - should have been the clue that it was not the time to run 25 yards to dispute the decision.
It does not matter how many times Mascherano had previously queried Bennett's judgment (which was plenty) or what he said when he got there, whether he swore, or doubted Bennett's parentage or merely inquired, as he claims: “What is happening?” It is the run that got him sent off, not the commentary.
Referees put up with a lot on the field because their dialogue with the players is ostensibly private. So José Manuel Reina can say to the referee that he thinks he is having a bad game and the referee might reply that it is hardly his fault that Reina cannot catch the ball, and life goes on. The television cameras famously picked out
Wayne Rooney repeatedly swearing at Graham Poll, the referee during a match at Highbury in February 2005, but in Poll's mind this was going on out of sight, certainly of the crowd, and he dealt with it man to man.
Where Mascherano overstepped the mark was in running across the field to begin his confrontation. This was a blatant act of defiance, one that undermined the authority of the referee in front of players, club officials and everyone in the stadium. It was the difference between a childish tantrum in the home, met with a five-minute time-out in the bedroom (and a scornful “you're not getting your way like that, Mister”) and one in the middle of the high street, which will receive all manner of hissed threats, curses and the administration of a parental code red (“no electronic toys of any description for a month, Sunshine, and this time I mean it”).
It is this nuance that went unappreciated by the league of old sweats, as embodied by Andy Gray, the Sky Sports football expert. If there was a list of clichés to cover a dissent-related red card, Gray ticked them off one by one, from ruining the game to the referee (not the player) losing control and being unable to handle a big match. “What, can't you talk to referees any more?” he asked, as if Mascherano had attempted to engage Bennett in cocktail-hour chit-chat in the manner of Noël Coward.
Richard Keys, the presenter, asked whether Mascherano had acted foolishly in the present climate. Gray claimed ignorance of any change in mood, a ridiculous stance considering the attention given Cole's behaviour, which coincided with the launch of the FA's campaign to win greater respect for officials. It was left to Jamie Redknapp, a former Liverpool captain, to acknowledge the need for a different approach - the irony being that, at this point, we saw Gray's view of any challenge to his authority, which was considerably less composed than Bennett's to Mascherano.
Thankfully, Redknapp refused to be bullied by Gray's raised voice and stood firm on the issue of professional responsibility. He deserves credit for that. It would have been easy to have joined the club, to have fallen in with the party line and, while he may not have won any friends at Anfield with his stance, he has gone up in estimations just about everywhere else, including, one hopes, at Sky.
Gray, by contrast, sounded like a voice from the past, a spokesman for football's credo of live and don't learn. Taken into the real world, the contention would be that as Johnny did not get a detention for talking during geography the first time, then Freddie should not get it, either, when he disrupts the lesson after the teacher has issued five warnings and the class is on the brink of anarchy. Football does not want consistency, it wants stupidity. It wants the freedom to make the same mistake twice. We got it wrong last time, so we must get it wrong this time, too. Yes, we'll keep being wrong, but at least we'll be consistent.
Perhaps it was for the best that Riley did not show Cole the red card he deserved at White Hart Lane. This error served as the wake-up call, the reminder that we had gone too far and it was time for adjustment. After what happened at Old Trafford on Sunday, any player approaching the referee in a disrespectful manner - including all 25-yard sprints, however cheerful the demeanour on arrival - is asking for a yellow card.
The difference between Mascherano and the child with the confiscated Game Boy is that one is a restless ten-year-old frustrated by a rainy Sunday and the other is a professional with five years' experience and worth £17million for his aptitude in a midfield role that requires discipline. The child might get his toy back after a few days of household chores, but from here, any player who has talked his way into trouble is going to need to do a lot more than a few bowls of washing-up to charm his way out of it.
