Cristiano Ronaldo’s suspended ban<\/a> before this tournament. <\/p>\nUnder Fifa’s disciplinary code, Ronaldo should have received a three-match ban for elbowing Dara O’Shea during Portugal’s 2-0 qualifying defeat by the Republic of Ireland in November.<\/p>\n
He served one match in the final qualifier against Armenia – but the remaining two games of the ban were suspended.<\/p>\n
Ronaldo’s red card, though, was received in qualifying. It was not a red card at a World Cup.<\/p>\n
There have been many cases of players being shown some leniency before a tournament, not just Ronaldo.<\/p>\n
See France’s Laurent Koscielny in 2014, or Ecuador’s Moises Caicedo and Argentina’s Nicolas Otamendi before this World Cup.<\/p>\n
At least with Ronaldo, we were given some justification, with Fifa saying it had taking into account that “he had no red cards in his other 225 international appearances”.<\/p>\n
With Balogun, we did not even get that.<\/p>\n
It has left a vacuum of information which can only lead to speculation.<\/p>\n
Why was this a special case? What factors were taken into account? Who made the decision?<\/p>\n
BBC Sport has been told there are no suggestions that the referee asked for the suspension to be removed, or that video assistant referee protocol was not respected.<\/p>\n
In England, the Football Association would publish the full written reasons. <\/p>\n
The United States have the right to ask Fifa to publish them, Belgium do not. <\/p>\n
BBC Sport pundit Micah Richards, a former England defender, said it was a farce.<\/p>\n
“To have it suspended for a year makes a mockery of the whole tournament,” he said.<\/p>\n
“It is to keep the big stars in the competition. How can that happen? Fifa needs to do better. <\/p>\n
“It has left a bad taste in a lot of people’s mouths.”<\/p>\n
Belgium are, of course, furious. They issued a statement on Sunday saying they were “astonished” that Balogun had been cleared to play.<\/p>\n
The Belgian FA referenced several regulations, workshop presentations and pre-tournament co-ordination meetings. <\/p>\n
They are adamant that the decision contradicts the tournament regulations which state that a player “will automatically be suspended from their team’s subsequent match”.<\/p>\n
In effect, they say Fifa used its disciplinary code to override the competition regulations.<\/p>\n
Belgium head coach Rudi Garcia, speaking at a news conference, went further. He said: “I didn’t know that [at] the Fifa World Cup 5 July is now 1 April, and that is April Fool’s.<\/p>\n
“We are not defending the national team or the federation, we’re defending football.”<\/p>\n
What must the other players sent off at this tournament be thinking?<\/p>\n
Take Qatar’s Assim Madibo, involved in an unfortunate incident which led to a broken leg for Canada’s midfielder Ismael Kone.<\/p>\n
There is a clear case here that Madibo did not even make a challenge, that the injury happened by chance and not because of the nature of the tackle.<\/p>\n
Yet Fifa handed Madibo a five-game ban – an extra three on top of the standard punishment for serious foul play.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There is one overriding question many people are now asking. How? Fifa’s disciplinary code states that Balogun should receive a ban of “at least two matches for serious foul play”. Indeed, the World Cup rules do not allow teams to appeal against a red card. Fifa’s statement offered no reason or explanation for suspending Balogun’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":56064,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-56063","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-us-canada"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56063","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56063"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56063\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56065,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56063\/revisions\/56065"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/56064"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56063"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56063"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56063"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}