Celtic fans must be sick as a nurse shark after the last three results... [video=youtube_share;7QGJUVwl7Jg]http://youtu.be/7QGJUVwl7Jg[/video]
Looks like Celtic might get an extremely lucky reprieve. Legia fielded an ineligible player for the last couple of minutes of the 2nd leg. Got sent off last season and received a three match ban. Seems they thought it was only one.
The precedent for this is just a fine. The match circumstances count, and the ineligible player only came on for a few minutes. They will stay out I think.
"Looks like Celtic might get an extremely lucky reprieve. Legia fielded an ineligible player for the last couple of minutes of the 2nd leg." Trying to do a Bentaleb, when this was a two leg tie and they were already soundly thrashed in the first leg ?? That would be a massively unjust punishment for Legia.
Bollocks. I know rules are rules but **** me, fielding a guy for the final 3 minutes when the result on aggregate was already 6-1 hardly affected the circumstances. Fine Legia, final warn them, reduce them of x amount of eligible players but kicking them out for that is a joke. Even more so that it means Celtic embarrasses the competition for another set amount of games.
Jeez... they've already been destroyed by a minnow, ineligible player or not! This season's CL campaign could be embarrassing for them.
"This season's CL campaign could be embarrassing for them." They have at least one more qualifying tie before getting to the group stage.
Legia will appeal and it seems like a very harsh punishment, but they made an extremely basic and avoidable error. Sherwood made a balls up with the NextGen which cost us, but this is more reminiscent of Newcastle's UEFA Cup issue with Lee Bowyer. They also failed to realise that you had to register players for them to serve bans, so his was effectively doubled. http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/teams/n/newcastle_united/3517337.stm The FA agreed with them at the time that the wording of the rules was ambiguous, so perhaps the updated version of the cup has a similar issue? Getting kicked out of the Champions League over this is unnecessary, really. The player was banned for three games and missed three games. It's clearly an honest mistake. The club didn't significantly benefit and the player's ban could be restored and they could pay a fine. No harm done.
It's UEFA. Are we really expecting common sense and fair and just punishments? Rules are rules and it could set a dangerous precedent maybe but the punishment doesn't seem to fit the crime in this case. Call me cynical but would Celtic still be more of draw than Legia Warsaw, TV and revenue wise? Sure Celtic are really, really **** but they are still a draw to some people........... if they can avoid losing another tie anyway.
UEFA didn't award Wales a 3-0 win when Russia fielded an ineligible player for 60 minutes in the Euro 2004 play-off...
Agreed. The rules state May. Which makes its even more of a disgrace as the player had no bearing whatsoever on the result so the panel could have decided not to punish them with a 3-0 loss.
