May it Please Your Lordships

It would appear from the nature of the charge sheet that it is Arsenal who are being held mainly responsible for a brief, but unsavoury, episode of unpleasantness towards the end of the Carling Cup final which seemed, in one way or another, to involve virtually every player on the field and to give at least one of the match officials scope for creative interpretation of events bordering upon hallucination.

To complicate matters further, there are rumours that the F.A. disciplinary committee, whose members like to keep both their identities and their qualifications for the job secret, are going to throw the book at Arsenal – which is of course no more than a club should expect for being consistently bottom of the News of the World’s published ‘Foul Play League’ and playing the most attractive and entertaining football the Premiership has ever seen.

But before these august gentlemen wield their formidable power in the interests of justice and fair play, we’d like to suggest a spot of homework. Start by examining the tapes carefully and impartially, then ask yourselves what it is that the Arsenal players did that no Chelsea players did. Then consider seriously whether the media were perhaps over-reacting when they described the Carling Cup skirmish as a ‘brawl’. To that end, studying the tape of the end of the recent Valencia v Inter Milan Champions League fixture should prove instructive. Now that was what you call a real brawl.