The disciplinary committee of the LFP had a heavy hand this Wednesday evening against Theo Pellenard.
Center-back auxerrois will be suspended for eight games after being sent off against SM Caen (2-2) this Saturday evening. He had injured the attacking midfielder on a tackle Mehdi Chahiri.
The latter has been operated on for an ankle fracture and will not return for four to five months. The Stade Malherbe coach Stephane Moulin considers this sanction disproportionate for a player he has coached in the past at Angers.
“I don’t think you’ve heard us say once that there was bad intention or an attack, notes the Caen coach.
The gesture created a serious injury but we must remain lucid and we are clear about the intention and the very violence of this gesture. It’s called an accident. And in any case, there was a will in Théo Pellenard to harm the physical integrity of Mehdi (Chahiri).
It makes me smile …. Well, no, it doesn’t make me smile because we actually lost a player. And I think it is the object of the sanction more than the gesture itself.
But hey, everything is quite disproportionate. When we see what is happening with violence in the stadiums for extremely minimal sanctions, a sanction like this is completely disproportionate in my opinion.
This does not mean that it should not be sanctioned, far from it. But that’s not going to restore Mehdi any faster. So there is no violent, nasty tackle from behind. It’s just a combination of circumstances where Mehdi has his foot in support which is planted in the ground and obviously, with all the weight and the intensity of the gesture … Finally, I am not saying that Nothing happened. I find that this is disproportionate considering not the injury of Mehdi but the gesture.
Moreover, nobody held it against Théo Pellenard: neither our players, nor the injured player in question because we have clearly seen that these are the kind of accidents that can unfortunately happen. “