Cissé handed seven-match ban Evans gets six-games suspension

Players ruled to have spat at each other during Premier League

Manchester United are on a collision course with the Football Association after the governing body refused to accept Jonny Evans’s denial that he spat at Newcastle United’s Papiss Cissé.

The United centre-half was on Saturday handed an automatic six-match suspension – mandatory for the offence under Uefa’s rule book – after an independent regulatory commission was convened on Friday night and upheld the FA’s charge. Much to United’s chagrin there is no right of appeal in such cases.

Cissé had already pleaded guilty and apologised for the incident at St James’ Park on Wednesday night, but the Senegal striker received a seven-match ban as he had been charged with violent conduct earlier this season when retrospective video evidence caught him elbowing Everton’s Séamus Coleman.

Evans issued a statement on Thursday – endorsed by Louis van Gaal – maintaining he “would never spit at a fellow professional”. While being careful not to deny that he did spit, the defender was adamant he did not aim it at Cissé but the independent regulatory commission evidently thought otherwise.

Van Gaal will know the loss of Evans, a key component of his often less than convincing defence, is hardly going to enhance Manchester United’s Champions League ambitions. If the Dutchman is unlikely to be left quite as publicly apoplectic as Sir Alex Ferguson might have been in similar circumstances, Van Gaal’s sense of grievance about the FA’s fast-track system of justice should not be underestimated. If United fail to finish the campaign in the top four and miss out on involvement in next season’s Champions League, the repercussions of Wednesday night’s confrontation can expect to be cited, repeatedly, in mitigation.

Like Anthony Taylor, the referee, Van Gaal and Newcastle’s head coach, John Carver, did not see an incident picked up by powerful television camera lenses. While close examination of the video images proves that Cissé spat at Evans in retaliation for what he perceived as the defender spitting at him, the evidence of the Northern Irishman’s culpability is arguably rather less conclusive.

While it is clear spittle left his mouth, it is possible to argue that it was a reflex gesture aimed at the ground rather than the Newcastle player. Yet with no appeal mechanism available to United such theories are rather academic as they prepare for life without Evans in not only Monday night’s FA Cup quarter-final against Arsenal but Premier League games against Tottenham Hotspur, Liverpool, Aston Villa and Manchester City. The final game of his suspension will be either an FA Cup semi-final or a league trip to Chelsea.

Considering that a dangerous tackle capable of ending a career or leaving its victim requiring surgery followed by months of rehabilitation usually attracts nothing more than a three-game ban the harshness of Evans’s punishment seems bound to provoke considerable debate.

Cissé, meanwhile, will be unavailable for Newcastle’s matches with Everton, Arsenal, Sunderland, Liverpool, Tottenham, Swansea and Leicester. Carver will be disappointed that his No9 must sit out the Wear-Tyne derby at Sunderland on 5 April. Instead he must rely on the gifted but inexperienced Ayoze Pérez, the unproven Emmanuel Rivière and the untested youngster Adam Armstrong.


By Louise Taylor / Guardian