Daniel Taylor

Rio Ferdinand will begin his eight-month suspension today with the Football Association warning Manchester United he cannot play even in behind-closed-doors friendly matches and the serious possibility that his appeal might not be heard until March.

Among the stipulations of the FA's suspension, United will be forbidden from going through with plans to invite a number of local clubs for games with the specific intention of keeping Ferdinand fit.

He will be allowed to train with his team-mates but cannot play in any game, competitive or not, when it is "11-a-side with match officials".

Ferdinand is also facing another delay in an already protracted saga because of the vast amount of paperwork that goes with such a complex case. After considering the FA's 37 pages of findings, Ferdinand's legal team have produced a 125-page document of their own. It arrived at Soho Square at 4 p.m. yesterday, only an hour before the deadline at which an appeal would have been automatically ruled out.

The FA's lawyers will spend the next three weeks wading through the legal arguments before, under their own regulations, they have to submit an official reply, but officials at Soho Square, among them chief executive Mark Palios, were said to be taken aback by the sheer volume of United's response.

Another critical factor is that, as well as appealing against his suspension, Ferdinand intends to fight his conviction on a charge of misconduct.

Had he just been hoping to get his sentence reduced, the FA would have simply reconsidered the evidence from the two-day hearing at Bolton in December and decided whether the punishment should be amended. Now, though, another hearing will have to be arranged for the player to give evidence, along with his character witnesses, UK Sport's drugs testers and everybody else who was involved, indirectly or not, when he failed to give a urine sample at United's training ground on September 23rd last.

The FA's next step will be to appoint a new three-man commission, chaired by a QC, and a convenient date will have to be set when everyone can attend. Whereas Alex Ferguson had said on Friday the hearing could be held within "the next 10 days or so", FA sources have indicated that more realistically it will be the late February at the earliest.

If the £30 million England defender does not succeed in getting his sentence reduced, he will miss the rest of the season, the European Championship finals in Portugal and the first six weeks of next season. The Champions League will resume - United play Porto home and away at the end of February and early in March - before his case is even heard.

Ferdinand and United have also been criticised for the way in which they have conducted their case. And it has been reported that there were clear inconsistencies in his evidence.

Gordon Taylor, the Professional Footballers Association's chief executive, has expressed his concern that the United defender will not be able to receive an objective hearing because of the weight and balance of publicity his case has already attracted.

Guardian Service