Phil Brown says Sam Ricketts was unlucky to be sent off against Sunderland on Saturday for two bookable offences. Having watched them again, I have to say I don't agree.
It pains a little, but I was always determined to offer credit where it was due elsewhere when I set this blog up, and also try to avoid viewing stuff through rose-coloured glasses. Partisanship is different to loyalty and can be an ugly thing sometimes.
The first of Ricketts' two fouls was late, but the Sunderland player in question made something of a meal of it - that is an understatement - and the faux-indignance of Kenwyne Jones probably didn't assist Ricketts' plight as Mike Riley strutted in our Welsh full back's direction and gave him a yellow card.
The second one is far more cut and dried as an out-and-out foul, more obvious than the previous one and yet less serious. I've read and heard numerous opinions about this tackle, predominantly saying that Ricketts got the ball and, again, the Sunderland player's overreaction was more paramount to Mr Riley's inevitable decision to show another yellow. Yet if you watch the television angle from behind the tackle, at the corner flag in the north east corner of the KC, the Sunderland player is the one who plays the ball and Ricketts arrives late and gets his ankle. This was not a tactical foul - if it was then it makes Ricketts an utter imbecile, and he isn't that - but it was a foul, a late challenge and although he did argue, as did his manager and the Tiger Nation, he can't really complain.
Ricketts' actions don't alter the view round these parts, which I share, that Mr Riley is a card-happy attention-seeker. He has form for this, as the debate for days and days which followed his officiating of our midweek Championship game against Burnley at the KC last season proves. But maybe the key question isn't whether Ricketts committed a foul, but whether the foul was serious enough to warrant a yellow card.
In these days of two strikes and you're off, any second foul by a booked player, no matter how innocuous, prompts derisive yells for the player's head from opposition players and fans, and often the opposition manager too. Yet one booking doesn't make a second foul automatically bookable, and Ricketts' second offence was less serious than the first, minutely mistimed and no more. If he had committed his second foul first, as an uncautioned player, I don't believe he would have been booked. It's an accumulative process, and I think Mr Riley decided to send Ricketts off as much for disrespect of his disciplinary position as for the foul itself. It was a case of "I've just booked you, how dare you undermine my authority by committing another foul? Be off with you." Ricketts was reckless but not spiteful, yet ultimately he has to be certain of winning a ball cleanly when he goes into a tackle like that as a carded player, and he let himself down.
Ricketts serves his suspension on Boxing Day and with Andy Dawson still struggling for fitness and confusion surrounding Paul McShane's availability after a head injury, City could struggle severely for full backs at Manchester City. Ricketts shoulders not all, but certainly some, of the blame for this.
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