FA Appeals and Fines
A few details about appeals and fines and what not coming out of the FA today. The one I'm going to start with is the incident between Aston Villa manager David O'Leary and Premiership refferee Graham Poll. O'Leary ran across the Birmingham pitch after his side's 1-0 derby win and gestured towards his chairman Doug Ellis in the directors' box. He ran past referee Graham Poll on the way and the charge relates to a comment made to the match official. O'Leary has until 1 November to respond to the charge. The FA were awaiting Poll's report before taking any action and have deemed the referee's description of events as serious enough to take action. An FA statement also said Villa's manager: "has also been reminded of his responsibilities in relation to his post-match celebrations".
Meanwhile Blackburn's Zurab Khizanishvili's red card has been recinded after the club appealed against the red card decision. Khizanishvili was dismissed after tripping Djibril Cisse, but the FA overturned the decision and he will therefore not serve any suspension. But the FA rejected Bolton defender Ricardo Gardner's appeal against wrongful dismissal during the 5-1 defeat by Chelsea. Gardner was sent off for handball and will serve an immediate one-game ban.
I would say the rulings made by the FA today are pretty fair. They were definetly right to recind Khizanishvili's red card because it wasn't really a bad challenge. If he wasn't awarded the red card during the match on Saturday I certainly could have seen Blackburn getting something out of the game. The decision not to recind Gardener's red card is a good decision because it was so blatent. The O'Leary incident has totally lost me because all I saw on Match Of The Day on Sunday was that he ran over to the other side of the pitch and saluted the chairman but I din't see the incident between him and Graham Poll.