Criminal tackles deserve bigger punishments

Here's a question: is there a point where a bad tackle in football can be categorized as assault?

The situation that's brought this particular quandary to mind is that of the news today that Hull City winger Craig Fagan had his leg broken by Newcastle's Danny Guthrie at the end of Saturday's match. For those who haven't seen it, Fagan takes the ball to the corner flag to waste time, and Guthrie sprints in and takes a swing at him, getting him just below knee height. All the time the ball is on the deck. TV replays show, a few seconds before that, Guthrie try to run his studs down Fagan's achilles. The red card that followed was a no-brainer; bizarrely (though it is possible), Fagan actually walked away from the incident.

A couple of hours later, John Terry got what can be diplomatically described as a soft red card against Man City for an innocuous foul 45 yards from goal, where he was deemed to be preventing a goalscoring opportunity.

Both players face three match bans. Fagan will be out for at least three months.

I don't have an answer to the above poser - however whereas you could reasonably describe Martin Taylor's infamous hack on Eduardo as reckless, I guess the issue with Guthrie is that there would not be a lot of difficulty in proving it to be a premeditated attempt to injure another player. That, for me, would be enough to lead to a rather long ban.

Not only that, but at least Martin Taylor grovelled in apology for days afterwards. I'm looking forward to hearing a peep of some sort from St. James' Park at some point?

Edit - all right, Guthrie has apologised. So I'll let him off just a little bit for being a total hacking b******...

L.