TOO MUCH

Last updated : 21 December 2003 By Editor

When the Rio Ferdinand verdict came in on Friday night, I was drinking in a Manchester pub with a tabloid's United correspondent, who had just confidently assured me that there would be no decision until Monday.

'The FA won't want to be accused of rushing to judgment or, even worse, prejudging the case,' he asserted. His plausible reasoning was that a mere 90-minute deliberation after two days of complex evidence would look suspiciously meagre. And it does.

Now, I know what you're thinking. 'Here comes another typical Moan U whinge-athon.' But bear with me.

I don't like Rio Ferdinand very much, either as player or man. I wholeheartedly accept that he ought to have been properly punished. I despair at the way football has been so soft on drugs over the past decade. I believe 'my' club handled this case abysmally and deserve a good public kicking, as do the motor-mouthed liability Gordon Taylor and Rio's bumbling 'advisers'.

I sympathise with FA boss Mark Palios hugely in his struggle to restore integrity to this stinking game. Moreover, until Friday, I reckon about 50 per cent of hardcore United fans would have agreed with all those statements and would have been quite content to see Rio banned for three months, as was expected.

And yet... with their decision to end Rio's season, the FA have succeeded in the hitherto impossible: they have united United's notoriously disputatious fans in opposition to their jaw-dropping sentence. They may even end up helping Rio become popular with the Old Trafford fans. (Victimhood is such a vote winner. Until Friday, Rio was a figure of fun on two major fan websites. Now he is threatening to join United's other 'FA martyrs' on the Stretford End banner which currently reads 'Cantona 95 - Becks 98 - Keane 02'.)

Cut through yesterday's forest of pro and con verbiage. The key problem here was the failure of the FA to make it clear from the outset that they had decreed 2003 as Year Zero of a new regime. United fans and journalists alike have been quaintly wedded to the idea of the supremacy of precedent. It's a very English response, rooted in common-law tradition and our sense of fair play.

We saw the sentences handed out to Mark Bosnich, Edgar Davids, Jaap Stam and Christian Negouai and we calibrated our expectations accordingly. Bosnich received virtually the same sentence as Rio has, yet he was found guilty of taking cocaine. One's sense of natural justice is therefore affronted.

Had the FA let it be known from the start that all previous sentences were - rightly - to be regarded with contempt and treated as a past dereliction of judicial duty, we wouldn't be in the midst of such a firestorm now.

Some United fans also suspect that this was really all about the ongoing struggle between the FA and Fifa. Sepp Blatter, whose new-found sense of crusading moralism is as nauseating as it is unexpected, will clearly be satisfied by what has happened.

Many cynical United fans believe that an appeal will succeed, reducing the ban to, say, four months and thus conveniently allowing Rio to help the loathed 'Ingerlund' in Euro 2004. Some Reds are arguing that we should not appeal at all since, no matter what, Rio's United season is effectively at an end. Why help the FA's beloved national team after they have so blatantly made an example of Rio at our club's expense?

Bottom line: Rio may well be a forgetful idiot - but he never deserved to be sentenced like a common criminal. And exemplary justice is an oxymoron.