Wenger opens appeals floodgates

Even in the immediate aftermath, a time when there was widespread acclaim for the offer by Arsenal, subsequently endorsed by the English FA and FIFA, to give Sheffield Wednesday a rematch after the two clubs' controversial cup match, there were those who said it was all going to end in tears.

The English game has yet to pay the price for Arsene Wenger's gesture. Over here, though, everybody wants everybody else to "do a bit of an Arsenal on it".

For a start, Kilkenny City maintained that all that was required to remedy their displeasure with Finn Harps and the FAI was a bit of sportsmanship - the Donegal club should have agreed to change the scheduled date of last week's replay to help City out of a hole. Even now, some in Kilkenny continue to suggest that Harps can save the day, and their souls, by offering to play the game again.

The fact that club officials at Buckley Park had been aware of the proposed replay date for a couple of weeks but did nothing to change it appears to make no difference to their view that right, if not might, is on their side. City work with a small squad, about 20 players, and have been well aware of the problems involved in operating with such a small squad. Alfie Hale regularly mentions them when chatting about his team's league games.

The rules regarding Cup replays undoubtedly cause them problems. Rule 12 obliges the first replay of a Cup tie to take place on or before the Thursday following the original tie. In a league based for the most part on part-time players, it is a crazy rule: the notice it allows employers to be given of the need for time off, as well as the time that it allows for travel and accommodation to be arranged by clubs, is absurdly short. Yet, Kilkenny or the other small clubs have never made any move to change that rule at the FAI's a.g.m.

Indeed, in a long series of conversations with officials of the FAI and of the two clubs involved in this dispute it became clear that several did not even know the rule existed. Hale insists that even as the game was being played he was under the impression that any replay would be either tonight or tomorrow.

The FAI, of course, were happy enough to instruct clubs to ignore the rule themselves last month when replays would have clashed with international fixtures. But when rounds of the cup are almost exactly a month apart and when only a couple of ties each season require a second replay, what the need for such a requirement is genuinely puzzling.

Nevertheless it is there. Just as FIFA's rule regarding the release of underage players to their national associations for competitive tournaments is there and just, in turn, as the rule is there stating that if the referee needs to stop and then restart a game for any unusual reason then he may drop the ball. In the latter case, when the ball is dropped, it's down to the players to win possession for their team, which all seems entirely reasonable until you get into the rather strange territory of players wandering about expecting endless displays of goodwill from their opponents.

In Cork on Sunday, Mark Herrick apparently expected Lee Thew to allow him to take possession of the ball when it was dropped because City had been in possession when play was stopped and he told him so. Thew misunderstood and, on whatever basis, felt that far from being expected to make a gesture, he was being offered one, and so he didn't even attempt to compete with Herrick. Within seconds City scored and immediately afterwards there were calls from the Dundalk camp for a sort of "Arsenal spirit" to be shown.

Dundalk players, it should be remembered, didn't exactly pursue the referee around Oriel Park when Shamrock Rovers were deprived of what would have been an important goal in their first meeting of the season because the net had a hole in it. Nobody blamed them for that - the error was referee Damien Hancock's rather than theirs.

In Oriel Park they simply did what every 10-year-old going out on a pitch for the first time is told to do. They played to the whistle. If everybody did that, then everything would be a great deal more straightforward. As Dundalk now know, what goes around comes around.

At least sticking to the rules of the game gives every party something solid to argue about afterwards. If a team chooses not to stick with them, as Kilkenny effectively did last week when deciding not to travel to Finn Park, then they should be prepared to put up with the consequences when it all goes badly wrong.

As indeed Sheffield United should have been last month at Highbury. Their goalkeeper knocked the ball out of play in order that one of his own players - not one of his opponents - could receive attention and he was, therefore, attempting to gain an advantage from his actions. As it is, Wenger's anxiety about the public's reaction to Marc Overmars's goal won him some short-term popularity, but promises to cause just about everyone else a good deal more harm than good.