'Justice' a matter of opinion

GLENN GIBBONS

IN ANY re-make of Sidney Lumet’s film, 12 Angry Men, the part of Juror No8 would be made to measure for Andy Davis, the linesman who appears to have been the only man at Tynecastle last Wednesday who believed that Lee Miller had fouled Rangers defender Sotirios Kyrgiakos inside the Hearts penalty area.

In the original, the role was taken by Henry Fonda, a man standing alone against 11 colleagues, all of them convinced of the guilt of the defendant.

The prima facie evidence in the case - a troubled teenager accused of the murder of his father - suggests that it is open and shut. In the course of the drama, Fonda, by argument and demonstration, persuades the others that his hypotheses on what really took place are not only possible, but probable.

Predictably (this is a Hollywood production, after all), the maverick forces all of the previously immovable jurors to change their votes to not guilty. Even the resistance of his hardest-headed opponent, the raging bull Lee J Cobb - his view is coloured by prejudice against the young, the result of a bad experience with his own son - is broken.

Judging by the torrent of furious e-mails that engulfed The Scotsman sports desk yesterday morning - the response to this columnist’s deliberations on the Davis affair, including the move by the Tynecastle club’s hierarchy for an inquiry and the likely outcome of their action - no amount of rhetoric is likely to dilute Hearts supporters’ conviction that a serious injustice was perpetrated.

In many cases, the vitriol threatened to burn a hole through the sports editor’s screen. Others, given the frequent examples in the past of the articulacy of regular readers of this section, were unsurprisingly coherent and reasoned in the presentation of their argument. All, however, were uncompromisingly hostile.

The criticism ranged from the misuse of facts through the lack of objectivity to the patently absurd accusation that criticism of the action taken by Chris Robinson and George Foulkes indicates a desire on the part of this correspondent to ingratiate himself with the SFA on the grounds that he is, as a consequence, rewarded with a series of "scoops".

A cursory glance at some of the David Taylor-inspired, condemnatory letters sent to the sports desk over my numerous reflections of the follies of the association - especially, in the recent past, with regard to the Berti Vogts fiasco - would be enough to disabuse anyone of the notion of the chief executive and myself as bedfellows.

In the main, however, the vituperation concentrated on the abuse of facts. The following is an example of the less hysterical protests: "Glenn Gibbons’s piece today and his post-match analysis last week is selective in its limited use of facts. The Dallas match report (the referee makes no mention of the penalty incident) apparently follows the same logic.

"I have no expectation that Hearts will succeed in their call for an enquiry, an exercise which has not been well handled. However, if there is no debate at all, and the only outcomes are disciplinary sentences for players, a number of serious issues will not have been openly addressed. The levels of public outrage currently on display are a direct consequence of the spectacular injustice served up by the match officials."

By taking his argument to its logical conclusion, this correspondent is suggesting, in effect, that any questionable decision - or even blatant error of judgment - by a referee or a linesman should be open to debate. It’s an admirable principle, but takes no account of the practicalities of implementation or, most disturbingly, of match officials’ right to be as fallible as the rest of us.

As for the facts, from the minute of mayhem that prevailed at the end of the match, three authentic, 24-carat examples emerge. The first is that Dallas, on the advice of Davis, awarded a penalty kick, the others that Dado Prso and Saulius Mikoliunas were both ordered off for misbehaviour.

Whether or not Miller committed an offence that merited a penalty kick is entirely a matter of opinion. Davis’s belief, clearly, was that he had. A personal view is that it was impossible to be certain, although it has to be acknowledged that the linesman witnessed it from a conspicuously different position than anyone in the press box, or even from the TV cameras.

It was because of this uncertainty that I suggested, in the piece written the day after - and 24 hours before Hearts declared their call for an inquiry - that the SFA could examine the linesman’s competence. As I underlined yesterday, that is different from investigating his integrity or motivation and, if pursued by the Tynecastle board, would have made their cause much more acceptable.

In the same piece, it was merely pointed out, as a matter of fact, that the SFA these days does not reprimand match officials on the basis of a single, identifiable blunder. Contrary to the interpretation of the majority of e-mailers, it was not an apologia for the association.

The real controversy in this instance is created by circumstance, timing and consequence. If, for example, Rangers - or Hearts - had been two ahead at the time, would there have been the same furore? Or, if it had occurred in, say, the 25th minute of the game, would it have prompted the same outrage?

The result of Davis’s decision was a scoreline - a 2-1 victory for Rangers - neither team deserved. For Hearts fans, quite properly, the frustration derived from the loss of a valuable point for their own side, with the implications for the destiny of the championship a complete irrelevance.

But none of this can obscure the certainty - and this reaches the very core of the issue - that whether or not Miller’s challenge on Kyrgiakos was legitimate remains, like every such decision made by a referee or linesman, a matter of opinion, not fact.

Taken from the Scotsman