I can recall Melbourne’s first red card of last season. Pantelidis was dribbling the ball down the left wing, going deep into the Jets’ half, and for the whole of the 20 metre run, he had Joel Griffiths hanging off his shoulder, pulling him back, grappling him, in short, trying to slow him down illegally. I can only assume the Ref didn’t blow the whistle because he paid the advantage to Pantelidis, but in the meantime, Pantelidis was getting mightily sick of Joel’s close attention and foolishly swiped at him with his elbow. Straight red.

The sense of injustice was exacerbated by the knowledge that a few weeks earlier, by rights, Joel Griffiths should have been rubbed out for most of the season for SackWhackGate, alas, embarrassingly for the league, he received just a yellow for having hit a ref in his nether regions.

Melbourne was to receive two more red cards for the remainder of what was ultimately a disastrous season, and all were correct calls – but a nagging doubt started to form that the reigning champs were subject to a higher standard of onfield behaviour than what was apparent in other games on any given weekend.

At least the FFA was big enough to admit that the whole SackWhackGate had been unfortunate, and that a new post-match review process would ensure a bit more consistency in the manner in which players were judged to have gone beyond the normal bounds of on field behaviour.

Six weeks into the new season, and the promise of greater consistency looks a million miles away, indeed, we are further away from that goal than at any stage in the A-League’s history.

Once again, Melbourne appears to be at the heart of the issue and a pattern has formed providing us with evidence that they are treated differently to other clubs when it comes to disciplining players.

Three weeks into the season, Melbourne was scoring freely, playing the most attractive football, in short, they were absolutely flying.

Three weeks later, with three consecutive red cards, and Melbourne shares top spot with Sydney, but is on the verge of going into free fall, no thanks to a spate of red cards which on closer inspection, and in comparison to what is happening with its rivals, look rather harsh.

For starters, for any club in any league to score three consecutive red cards is an extremely rare occurrence. I have looked for similar occurrences in the other major leagues of the world, but I am yet to find one. If we were to find it, one suspects that one or more of the cards would have been associated with violent behaviour.

But here is the rub – none of the Victory’s three cards have involved violent behaviour, not even close.

So the whole scenario starts to look a little weird, but it gets even weirder.

Video footage of each of the incidents indicates that none of the reds were proven beyond reasonable doubt – they are all inconclusive, and in all honesty, questionable. Indeed, for Fabiano’s spitting offence, it transpires that there is grave doubt that the ref actually witnessed anything at all (and yet at one point the FFA was happy to increase the penalty from 6 weeks to 9 weeks when the Victory appealed).

You may conclude that it must mean that Melbourne has a disciplinary problem. But in fact Melbourne has the lowest yellow card count and the lowest foul count of any team in the league this season!

But it gets worse.

In the last three weeks, there is has been one violent action that stands out in all the games played, and that was Danny Tiatto’s elbow to Vargas in Melbourne’s home game on Sunday against the Queensland Roar. It was of the type that most certainly would have got a player reported in the AFL.

No one denies that this occurred, and that it was clear cut, yet the FFA has concluded that Danny Tiatto has “no case to answer”.

In the context of Melbourne’s three consecutive red cards, in the context of Pantelidis’ red card last season and Fred’s two seasons ago (for elbowing), and in the context of the FFA’s promise to improve the consistency of the whole disciplinary process – this decision is not only weird, it is not only inconsistent – it smacks of out and out bias!

But why would the FFA have an agenda for putting a dampener on Melbourne’s bright opening to the season? I can think of two reasons:

1. The A-League is young and while it takes some solace in the numbers Melbourne is able to draw, it really can’t afford to have Melbourne dominate the season like it did two seasons ago, in the interests of building up the support of the other clubs – in short, it is much better if the silverware can be shared around a bit more; and
2. The FFA has just announced that it will proceed with a 2nd Melbourne team in two seasons, and once again, the FFA can’t afford to have such a strong Victory team if it wants to establish a 2nd Melbourne team alongside it.

Of course many will find such a scenario far-fetched, but they would have very short memories. Even the world champion of 2006 was found to have a domestic competition so riddled with corruption and match rigging that external bodies had to take some extreme measures.

In the present case, I conclude the following: the A-League can have no credibility while its disciplinary process is seemingly so inconsistent, and the fact that the owner of SFC is actually on the FFA board goes no way to improving the perception that perhaps the competition is susceptible to being rigged.

Pippinu d’Angelo is author of Li pila di pippinu, a blog about the wonderful combination of football and linguistics. He was also one of the founders of the Sicilian version of Wikipedia. Pippu has followed the Socceroos closely since they first appeared in the 1974 World Cup. More recently, he jumped on the Melbourne Victory bandwagon and despite being born and raised in Melbourne, but he has not lived there for 20 years.

This article was originally published on Li pila di pippinu as Is the A-League a credible competition?