Manchester United failed in its bid to overturn the red card shown to Lisandro Mart\u00ednez in the Premier League defeat to Leeds United. The club lodged an appeal against the dismissal found on VAR review, but the FA\u2019s regulatory commission has confirmed the appeal was unsuccessful and Mart\u00ednez will serve the three-match suspension originally imposed.<\/p>\n
After the game, Michael Carrick was blunt in his assessment of the decision. “That decision was one of the worst I\u2019ve ever seen,” Carrick fumed after the game. “[Calvert-Lewin] can throw his arms in Licha\u2019s face\u2014and then he\u2019s sent off. Shocking. I don\u2019t even know what it looks like. It\u2019s not a pull, it\u2019s not a tug, it\u2019s not aggressive. He touches [the hair] and he gets sent off. We have got to be careful where the game is going. It is a shocking decision, absolutely shocking.” Carrick later reiterated his view but declined to expand: “It\u2019s obvious how I felt after the game, and I still feel that way now. I don\u2019t want to go into it now. It is what it is. We have to accept it and move on.” <\/p>\n
The club secretary\u2019s letter, dated two days after the match, “set out in detail” why United believed the dismissal was wrongful and that the standard punishment would be “clearly excessive.” United included three videos with the appeal: one of the full incident between Calvert-Lewin and Mart\u00ednez, one showing contact made on Leny Yoro during the same match, and footage of a February hair-pulling incident involving Kenny Tete for which a sending off did not follow.<\/p>\n
The presiding commission, made up of former referee Steve Bennett, former Premier League champion Stuart Ripley and ex-defender Francis Benali, found unanimously that there was no “obvious error” by the match officials. The judgement stated: “The pulling of a person\u2019s hair can be interpreted to fall outside the normal constituent elements of a challenge in football and can therefore fall into the category of violent conduct. The commission did not feel that it could be said with any confidence that the force exerted by [Lisandro Mart\u00ednez] on [Dominic Calvert-Lewin\u2019s] hair\/scalp was negligible.” The panel said Mart\u00ednez “grasped” the hair and Calvert-Lewin\u2019s reaction “suggested that he had felt a certain amount of force exerted upon his hair\/scalp.” It concluded “it was not outside the parameters of reasonableness for the Referee to have interpreted the VAR footage in the way that he did and he could not, therefore, be said to have made an obvious error.” <\/p>\n
The commission added that although hair pulling is low on the violent conduct scale it “ought not to be tolerated” and “should be discouraged through consistent punishment.” Mart\u00ednez has served the first match of the ban and will miss the Premier League games with Brentford (April 27) and Liverpool (May 3); he will be eligible to return at Sunderland on May 9. The suspension might have been more disastrous had events unfolded slightly differently.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
FA rejects appeal: Lisandro Mart\u00ednez to miss three-match ban after red card against Leeds. 2 games.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12851,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[702,1083,969],"tags":[1505,1553,1393],"class_list":["post-12852","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-leeds-united","category-man-utd","category-premier-league","tag-accountability","tag-bookings","tag-centre-back"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12852","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12852"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12852\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12851"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12852"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12852"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12852"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}