No side wins in damaging dispute

Column/National League: While his relief at the decision is undoubtedly understandable, it's hard to see how Brendan Menton or any of the other senior officials who have played a part in the Paul Marney affair over the past six months can be entirely happy after yestedray's ruling in the High Court.

Menton said all along that he wanted a "football decision" to resolve the dispute and by upholding Liam Reidy SC's arbitration findings, that was precisely what had happened.

The irony, though, is that in reaching his decision to uphold the outcome of the arbitration Mr Justice O'Sullivan cited the precedent of a court's reluctance to interfere with the result of arbitration in a dispute involving an insurance company not a sports club. The reality then is that his judgment in this case serves to confirm football's place in a world from which Menton and so many other administrators would rather save it.

Ultimately the judge didn't see fit to allow either side to come out of this case in sole possession of the high moral ground. On the one hand, he said, the fact that Shelbourne had declined offers to become involved in the arbitration process had largely undermined their right, he argued, to challenge its outcome afterwards. In effect the message was that the club might have been better served by engaging in the arbitration process, especially as the league's clubs had, back in October, decided by 10 votes to nine that they would abide by a decision reached in such a process.

That process, though, still looks to have been deeply flawed and Liam Reidy's stated acceptance both of the St Patrick's Athletic claim to have sent a registration form for Marney - albeit by the incorrect form of post - and that rule 16 of the league is commonly breached remains a particularly controversial element of this entire saga.

For the FAI the downside of the judgment comes with the mention of a lack of clarity, as the judge put it, in the relationship between Merrion Square's two sets of rules - those of the association and those of the league. This, he said, was a legitimate and real difficulty for a club in Shelbourne's position and on that basis he partially waived the convention that the losing side pay all of the winner's costs in a case like this.

That conflict may start to be addressed this summer when the league's commissioner, Roy Dooney, is expected to bring forward a package of changes aimed at dramatically overhauling the league's regulations.

For all the sympathy that might be felt for St Patrick's "in the spirit of football" the upshot of all this is that through sloppiness or some other cause they breached one of the most basic rules of the game's administration and, instead of the prescribed punishment, they have been fined a sum so insignificant that it is hard to describe it as a punishment at all.

Whatever anybody thinks about their motives, Shelbourne's refusal to allow that situation go unchallenged, deserves to be applauded.