Dramatic week of misconduct in Premiership; Gascoigne tops offenders’ list

The moment of high farce was provided by Gazza, the pitchside Peter Pan. Not for the first time, he lunged at an opponent; not for the first time, he injured himself. The last memorable instance was during the 1991 FA Cup final when he lunged at Nottingham Forest’s Gary Charles. That time, he tore his cruciate ligaments and has never been the same player since. This time, he broke his left arm and, given his usual fitness level, the fallout could be far more ominous.

And for sheer idiocy, you can’t top Leicester City and their week-old signing Stan Collymore. In Spain, for a sunshine break prior to the Worthington Cup final this weekend, Leicester footballers went heavy with the booze at their resort. When asked to leave the bar, Collymore who was recently treated for depression set off the fire extinguisher. The team was subsequently expelled from the resort.

The list mentioned above omits this season’s most frequent and celebrated behavioral offenders, Manchester United, whose players were again involved in now-typical histrionics at Newcastle and whose captain Roy Keane was sent off and two others nearly so as well. Two matches previously, United players had made the front pages in spectacular fashion when, led inscrutably by Keane, they surrounded referee Andy D’Urso, who had committed that rarest of blunders: Awarding a penalty against United at Old Trafford. They were in danger of losing the match, against Middlesbrough, and their grip on the Premiership.

D’Urso stood his ground metaphorically, if not physically he was forced to take a few steps back by the fury of the United mob and the penalty stood. Bosnich saved the kick and United won the match before another rare incident: Alex Ferguson slammed his players in public. Maybe Fergie, shrewd tactician that he is, was just pre-empting the inevitable. United escaped then the FA’s censure and the effect of that lapse was evident this past weekend.

The affliction is most pronounced among other top Premiership teams as well. Among the teams charged by the FA, Leeds are second in the Premiership and Chelsea and Tottenham have credibility, if not the points. Arsenal should consider themselves lucky they or their players are in the clear. Maybe their time will come, especially if Viera has his way.

It’s not a situation that has developed overnight. English teams have long had a history of hard men and hard on-field battles. The great teams of the 70s (Leeds and Liverpool), of the 80s (Liverpool again) and of the 90s (Arsenal and Manchester United) have had their share. The last two clubs have a long history of acrimony and were each docked two points in the late 80s for a mass brawl.

Rarely, though, has the game been so off-putting to neutral members of the public as it is today, ironically a time when attendances are soaring and money being pumped in as never before. If United have escaped the wrath of the FA, they still attract the disgust of most neutrals, as letters to the sporting pages of English papers indicate. Theirs is but the extreme manifestation of the basic problem with top English clubs and their players: Might is right, let the fittest survive. The ball is now in the FA’s court. Too often in the past, when dealing with the bigger clubs, they have tended to score own goals. This time, they can convert the penalty and make it count.