For a player who has worn Aberdeen’s colours with distinction in 200 matches, it feels somewhat insulting that Graeme Shinnie should come to his greatest national newsworthiness for the four in which he will not.
There are two questions which the SFA must answer in respect of Aberdeen’s unsuccessful appeal against Shinnie’s Dingwall dismissal.
Is it at all fair that a player can have the ban for an offence increased as punishment for requesting its review; and if it is, was Shinnie’s so outrageous as to meet any reasonable threshold?
Conceptually, the fast-tracking of the system now precludes clubs from gaming it to delay bans while the process unfolds, so it should follow that the extra-judicial lengthening of suspensions, initially added to the SFA‘s armoury to prevent this, is deleted.
If there is no longer any means by which clubs can gain competitively by appealing dismissals, then the persistence of this practice serves only as an intimidatory tactic to discourage the challenge of authority.
But even whilst the imbalance remains, it is a very tenuous position to argue that Shinnie’s infringement was so serious in nature to place it into a completely different category to almost any other taken to tribunal by clubs in recent years.
Justified appeal for Aberdeen Graeme Shinnie ban
The Dons were justified in pointing out that the tackle was not fundamentally dissimilar to, for example, that of St Johnstone’s Nicky Clark on Ryan Jack. And if we are talking frivolity, if an appeal essentially based on the proposal that a strong wind could have caused an opponent to hear a phantom racial slur was not deemed sufficiently risible to merit the extension of a ban, this assuredly wasn’t.
The scales of justice were heavily tipped against Aberdeen last week. Fortunately, the Dons had their own Scales, and they were calibrated just right to bring restitution.
Conversation