Chelsea should be kicked out of Europe for a year??

The feeble excuses have been made and the bogus apologies have been mumbled. And, at the close of a shameful week, Chelsea Football Club await their punishment. Sadly, they appear confident of the outcome.

An honest referee has been cruelly traduced and physically threatened. A grand European occasion has been reduced to a tawdry farce. And the tattered remnants of football's reputation have been paraded across a few million television screens.

Now UEFA, who will sit in judgment this week, are acutely aware of all these factors.



They are also aware that Chelsea are improbably wealthy, politically powerful and notoriously vindictive. So the best guess is that the odious Didier Drogba will be served up as the designated victim and given perhaps a six-match European ban, while the club will have their knuckles gently rapped. And that will be the end of it.

But, of course, it must not be the end since events at Stamford Bridge tell us too many disquieting truths about the state and nature of our national game. The incidents are distressingly familiar. There was Drogba's eye-popping, finger-jabbing, foulmouthed eruption. There was Michael Ballack's manic posturing when a decision did not suit him. There was Jose Bosingwa, who called the referee 'a thief' and said he 'had been bought'.

The whole affair was vile, scandalous, despicable. And yet, given the arrogant insularity which afflicts English football, it was also predictable.

Consider the responses to the ugliness of Stamford Bridge. Jamie Redknapp, Sky TV's resident intellectual, was apparently enraged by the referee's nationality. Mr Tom Henning Ovrebo comes from Norway and Redknapp found that unforgiveable.