It seems that despite what we and Ashley himself might think, according to the rules the Arsenal left-back did nothing wrong after Nic Anelka scored against us yesterday.

There is a rule that says that delaying the re-start is an automatic yellow card, but like I said in yesterday's report, Ash could hardly be accused of causing a delay while no-one else was ready for the re-start.

It seems that there's a little-known FIFA rule that makes this explicit. Philippe, together with former St Etienne skipper Jean-Michel Larqué, was going through the full FIFA rule-book yesterday and apparently there's an addendum to Rule 10 which "states very clearly that no member of the team which has scored should attempt to retrieve the ball from the net, and that it is up to the team that has conceded to bring the ball back to the centre circle. Should a member of the scoring team attempt to do so, the referee should automatically issue a yellow card on the spot."

As Philippe points out, most refs do not stick to this rule, and no-one seems to know about it. So it seems that Anelka had absolutely no right to try to wrestle the ball from Ashley.

It'll be interesting to see what the ref's report says. As Cole has stated, he did push Anelka too afterwards. A yellow card for retaliation is probably fair but no more, whatever Cole says. He was clearly pissed off but did nothing that compares with having Anelka's hands around his face (Edu on the other hand was lucky to get away with his part in it). If Anelka had been shown a yellow for raising his hands to Cole then according to this rule he should also have been shown another yellow just for trying to get the ball. So a red card is probably right according to the rules. Hopefully for Anelka and City's sake it won't be a 3 game ban though: on yesterday's showing (the threat he posed combined with the lack of it posed by the rest of his team) they'll miss him badly.

But it does seem that what some of the press and even City boss Keegan have been saying is quite wrong. "Nicolas definitely pushed him in the face but it is what happened before that which is important," says Keegan. No mate, what happened after might be significant but what happened before was nothing.

Rupe adds...
Contrary to what I said above, Edu was (rightly) booked after the incident. That's what I thought at the time, but the official Arsenal report said otherwise and I had assumed that they were right. But the ref has confirmed that Edu was booked.