Naughty by numbers

Craig Bellamy and Gary Neville will not face charges of improper conduct following Sunday's highly charged Manchester City/United confrontation, although Emanuel Adebayor still faces an improper conduct charge following his, er, charge down the field to celebrate the goal he scored against his old team Arsenal (again for Manchester City) in front of his ex-employer's fans. In the light of Bellamy and Neville's misdemeanours, Adebayor can therefore sleep peacefully, knowing that he is also unable to face charges. True? Or may be not? Given that most disciplinary cases inevitably seem to be dominated by interpretation, thereby implying the strong influence of a large degree of human judgement, errors and therefore inconsistency are surely the characteristic of such decisions? In other words, Emanuel, don't assume anything just yet. Could it therefore be that sport, in this case football, looks at a more scientific, possibly quantitative approach to arriving at disciplinary decisions? For instance, could approaches such as the Delphi or the Critical Incident Techniques produce more rigorous, more scientific, more balanced, fairer and more justifiable decisions than the current over-reliance on interpretivism?