Re: Discipline

By John Rogers30/8/2015 11:20Sun Aug 30 11:20:58 2015In response to Re: Discipline

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I found yesterday's spectacle as a whole thoroughly depressing. Not just the incident that led to Murphy's dismissal, but the entire afternoon.

Almost every time the referee awarded a free kick one way or the other, there was a player disputing the decision, often with accompanying profanity. Now, I, for one, would like to see absolute zero tolerance displayed by an official one day and just dish out red and yellow cards as soon as anyone opened their mouth.

Both sides were as bad as eachother yesterday harranguing the referee, trying to con the referee and generally behave like spoilt little schoolboys. It was the same against East Thurrock on Monday evening and, I suspect, will probably be the same tomorrow. In that knowledge, it is with little enthusiasm that I will be attending the game tomorrow.

Murphy was silly, has already held his hands up and apologised for losing his head. I realise that it was a split second reaction, and getting thrown to the floor is not really everyone's cup of tea - but the decision has gone our way. The referee is dealing with Joe Francis. Just take a second out. Now, we lose probably, alongside Morgan, our best player of the season so far for three matches.

Then there's Shulton. How many times does he have to get booked for dissent before someone, somewhere tells him that enough is enough? He is one booking away from suspension. Three of those cautions have been for 'gobbing off' at the referee. He's a grown up isn't he? Why not learn a lesson sometime. I'm sick of it. Absolutely sick of it. Do the players get fined for dissent? If not, why not? If so, perhaps we should be looking at increasing the penalty.

The club are rightly trying to build a family club ahead of the move to SJP - I am fully behind that. Absolutely 100% committed to it. However, this has to filter right through every fibre of the club, on and off the pitch. It's all well and good supporters being expected to behave in a certain way (and I believe that we should be able to conduct ourselves with a modicum of restraint and decency), but the players and manager have to begin to take responsibility as well.

There are many parts of the Maclaren issue that I have found, and continue to find extremely troubling and I don't envy Simon, Rob, Mike and David in the slightest. I'm not going to pontificate too much about it on here, only to say that I wrote something on here a few months ago after Kevin had been sent-off against Lewes. I stand by those comments 100%. No-one, no matter how much loyalty they've shown the club, should think themselves, or be thought by others to be bigger than the club as a whole.

In between the sniping and whinging yesterday, the players played some good football up to the final third. Unfortunately, we were lacking that little bit of spark, guile and sharpness in the final third. It wasn't losing yesterday that was so hard to take, it was the manner of defeat.