Ive tackled badly before. I stamped on this ****** last year and got sent (first time ever) Massive rush of blood. I wont condone it. Ive been tackled badly before.
Obviously I wasn't there, so I don't want to accuse you of anything unfairly i.e. how dangerous your stamp really was.
However, hypothetically say you are on street outside of a club. In full view of a passing policeman, you stamp on a defenceless guy, with such force and aggression that a major injury (one that could take him out of the workforce for 6-12 months) was not only possible, but likely.
Now say you did the same aggresive stamp on a football pitch.
Do you think these 2 should to treated as entirely different events?
If it was one of our players on one of theirs, would we want to seriously criminally punish our own?
Hardly the point is it? I wouldn't want one of our players to be locked up no matter what they did. But if one of them got done for fraud or something, and got jail time, they'd rightly go down.
And this isn't about taking it out on any opponent who causes an injury. Like I said, the Taylor tackle was bad, but it was a genuine football tackle. When you go onto the pitch, you accept you might get injured by an aggressive opponent who mistimes a tackle - that's just part of the game. That doesn't mean you have to accept somebody just running at you and stamping on your leg, just because a ball full of air is somewhere within a 10 yard radius.
To whoever suggested banning offenders for the length of the victim's injury: it's a terrible idea, wouldn't work. Injuries aren't automatically related to how bad the tackle is. With this system, you'd get some horrendous tackles that get a 3 match ban (because the victim god lucky), and some just mistimed tackles that result in a 2 year+ ban.
What happens if you just trip a player, he falls awkwardly on his head and breaks his neck? What happens if a player suffers an average injury (say a broken toe), but before he comes back to action, he suffers a recurrence (i.e. it's the same injury, and he was never fit, but he made his recovery longer by trying to rush back)? What happens if (say) Ronaldo injures a crap Liverpool youngster. Wouldn't Liverpool try to claim the youngster is still injured, even when he's actually fit? What happens if the ref at the time ruled the tackle as fair, but replays show it's actually not? What happens in the opposite case? What happens if the victim was 38 years old, and suffers an injury that would take 18 months to recover from, so he just retires? Could we tell James Vaughan to stand by Gareth Barry for 90 minutes (because chances are he'll get injured if he gets fouled, and our league rivals will lose their best player for like 12 months).
