A throw-in that got away from everyone at Fratton Park
Some images a club would rather never exist. Saturday in the Championship, 70 minutes gone, Portsmouth 2-0 up on Cardiff. Krystian Bielik went to fetch the ball near the stands for a throw-in. A young home supporter took his time handing it back. The Poland midfielder reached into the stand and grabbed him by the throat.
The spectator got back up and hit the player in the face. Play stopped for several minutes while the referee spoke to both managers and the captains. The fan was removed from the stadium. Bielik walked away without a card, without so much as a word.
Try it for $0.99.
The referee said nothing. The manager did.
That imbalance is the part people cannot get past. A player puts his hand on the neck of a minor in the crowd, no sporting punishment follows, and the supporter is the one escorted out. Asked about it afterwards, Cardiff boss Brian Barry-Murphy said the officials handled the incident “impeccably”, while pointing to what his players take from the stands in English grounds every week.
He has a case. It settles nothing. The FA holds retrospective powers and can punish what a referee did not deal with on the day, and it may well use them this week. Bielik, 28, is no stranger to any of this. He came through Arsenal. He knows exactly how fast a clip travels in England.
A season already running hot
Cardiff were two down with 20 minutes left, inside one of the loudest grounds in the division. The frustration is easy enough to understand. It does not stretch far enough to cover what happened next.
The timing is bad for the Welsh club. A ban of several games would leave Barry-Murphy short in an area where he is already thin, and Cardiff have little margin this early. What the FA does next will decide whether this reads as a late-summer flashpoint or something that follows the player around for months.
Discover the rest of the FOOT news on our mathodds website and app!
in your pocket.
Real-time notifications & alerts
Leave a Reply