Should hair pulling be violent conduct? Does it deserve three-match ban?

Cast your mind back to August 2022. Tottenham defender Cristian Romero pulled Chelsea’s Marc Cucurella by the hair.

VAR, Mike Dean, chose not to intervene due to the obvious red card.

He created a line in the sand. From then on, a zero tolerance approach was adopted.

Has the hair been pulled? A red card is then given for violent behavior.

Strict enforcement means that we must accept that there are cases like Keane and Martinez where the penalty seems too harsh.

It’s a bit like handball in the Champions League. People don’t like some punishments, but they know what they’re getting.

If you want consistency then you can’t have common sense either.

Following Keane’s red card, referee boss Howard Webb made it clear that hair-pulling was “a pretty offensive thing to do”.

“It was a fitting outcome,” Webb said. “It was an unusual situation, but if we see it again next week it will be the same result.”

It took a few months before we saw that Martinez was in a similar situation, and it turns out Webb was right.

Only one red card was given by VAR in the Premier League against Southampton’s Jack Stephens against Cucurella.

There were several more examples of this in the Club World Cup, the Women’s Super League and the Women’s European Championship.

Hair pulling is one of those dark arts that is often only noticed through video evidence.

This occurs off the ball but is more noticeable than a gentle elbow to the chest or a nip to the stomach.

Even in the EFL, where there is no VAR, Ipswich’s Leif Davis was recently banned after he was caught on camera pulling the hair of Leicester’s Caleb Okoli.

But the evidence is not always clear.

Fulham’s Kenny Tete could have been sent off for pulling Manchester City’s Antoine Semenyo’s hair in February. It may have happened but VAR did not think the evidence was conclusive enough to review.