Andy Gray

Every week, Betfair Football's star tipster Andy Gray will be picking out and answering his favourite question out of those he is asked on Twitter and Facebook. Here's his answer to this week's poser...

"Was the Dutch coach right to drop Nigel de Jong? And was SI.com's Grant Wahl right to call him the 'dirtiest player in world soccer'?" - @PaulLomax

A lot has been made of Nigel de Jong's tackle on Hatem Ben Arfa last weekend. The incident has since attracted extra attention as a result of Bert van Marwijk's decision to drop the Manchester City man from his Dutch squad to play Moldova and Sweden, claiming this time he went too far.

His decision is an interesting one and must be interpreted as him making the point to de Jong that he doesn't condone those sort of tackles, nor does he want him being part of his plans when he's doing things like that. A similar thing happened to me under Jock Stein when I was playing for Scotland; he told me he was leaving out of a particular squad to teach me a lesson. It doesn't matter anymore what it was that I did wrong, it was a long time ago!

But let's get back to the crux of the issue. Newcastle and Ben Arfa are obviously disappointed with what's happened and understandably so: the boy was just beginning to settle in this league and the team have been deprived of one of their best creative forces for an indefinite amount of time.

But I don't think it was a malicious tackle; replays show he didn't catch him with his leading foot, it was his trailing leg that made contact and it was just very unfortunate that the damage that caused was so severe.

De Jong is an extremely committed player and anyone who plays in that sort of role, running around the field making tackles, is always at risk of causing a serious injury but I'll maintain he didn't go out to injure the Frenchman. And that's why I'm not in the camp that believes he should receive retrospective punishment for the challenge.

It's a very unfortunate incident all round and I'm sure the FA and its referees will be keeping a close eye on de Jong's future conduct but for the time being we should just put the whole thing down as just something that happens in football from time to time and leave it at that.