Swansea man may well deserve ban for swinging elbow, but not charging Sterling shows ludicrous nature of FA laws surrounding "raising your hand"
Someone, somewhere at the FA, is having a good laugh over this one. In their wisdom, the FA have decided to charge Jonjo Shelvey with violent conduct for swinging an arm at Emre Can - an incident which even Liverpool boss Brendan Rodgers described as "accidental" - but somehow Raheem Sterling has escaped unpunished for raising his hand and striking Fede Fernandez in the face. I say striking, I'm not saying it was a punch but he moved his arm so quickly - when you do that in someone's face nine times out of ten you'll see red on the spot.
As mentioned on Sky after the game, part of the problem is the FA's rules. For the FA to charge a player retrospectively the referee cannot have included the incident in his match report - ie. it has to have been something which went unnoticed at the time. This makes me wonder just what was in that match report; the Shelvey incident is definitely easier to pass off as something which the referee missed, but if the Sterling incident wasn't in the match report either why hasn't he been charged?
What's more, if the incident did make the match report, just what was Andre Marriner's explanation for not taking any action against Sterling? What was his assistant's excuse for not flagging up (literally!) Sterling reaching over his shoulder to get to Fernandez? That little set-to came about as a result of the Liverpool man pushing Fernandez into touch, which was pretty dangerous on it's own. Fernandez came back and tapped the back of his head, sure, but Sterling's reaction was ridiculous and, in my opinion, warranted a red card based on similar incidents which have gone before.
I've spoken a few times in recent weeks about how the Swans have had some decisions go our way - decisions which we would have heavily criticised had they gone the other way - so I'm aware that some go your way and others don't. I do think though that this is the biggest example of ineptitude we've seen so far from the Football Association this season. You see players sent off for doing what Sterling did week in week out, and while it's soft it seems a fairly blanket rule.
What seems to have gone against us in this case is that, inkeeping with Monk's wishes, Fernandez didn't hit the deck and roll around Platoon-stylee. Perhaps if he'd have gone down like he'd been shot we wouldn't be having this discussion, but I'm against that and it's not something I'd want to see from our players. What I do want is referees and a football association able to make sensible judgements based on the information available to them.
I do acknowledge the Premier League probably has the best standard of refereeing in the world, but quite simply when the prizes at stake are worth many, many millions of pounds inconsistencies such as these are unacceptable. If this is a result of the rules not fitting their purpose, they need to be changed.
It seems likely Shelvey will be hit with a three-match ban as Cisse has just been given the same punishment for a similar (if more aggravated) offence, and I can't see us contesting the charge. Given Sterling hasn't even been charged, it seems unlikely we'd see a positive outcome.