James Lawton: Football must rally to cause as Palios shows an iron fist

FA's chief executive has sounded the battle cry and there should be no compromise in fight against the game's epidemic of indiscipline

Though much of the reaction was excessive - and this was perhaps out of pure relief - there is no doubt that, generally speaking, the footballers of England acquitted themselves well in Istanbul.

Apart from automatically qualifying for next summer's European Championships, those with a few brain cells to rub together regained control of the dressing-room.

However, it would be crazy to imagine that the subduing of some distinctly wimpish Turks achieved anything more than a pause on what, if the proper action isn't taken now, is beginning to look like the game's tragi-comic version of the road to perdition.

Mark Palios, the new chief executive of the Football Association, holds the key to a successful injection of sanity and that he has established himself in this role so soon after his predecessor, Adam Crozier, was railroaded out of the game by the power brokers of the Premiership, is nothing less than a stunning achievement.

Palios has, let us remind ourselves, a huge challenge. Events have turned him into the Lord Protector of Football, which is a high-flown assessment only if you haven't picked up to any significant degree on the mad-dog reaction to his principled move to exclude Rio Ferdinand from an important international game because he failed to take a drugs test.

Mad dogs? Let's say that if the attitudes and comments of Sir Alex Ferguson, the manager of Manchester United, and Gordon Taylor, head of the Professional Footballers' Association, had been any less restrained over the last few days, tranquillising darts would surely have had to be considered as a debating option. Ferguson said he was thrilled with the unity displayed by his players in the England camp - a togetherness which brought the team to the sickening proximity of an unprecedented strike. Taylor, a man with football in his veins and one on whose side of an argument in the past it has usually been the natural place to reside, has painted Ferdinand a victim and the would-be strikers as fighters for deeply entrenched principle.

Throw in these reactions, and the state of denial of Arsène Wenger when his Arsenal players dragged the game into the dirt at Old Trafford recently, and we see the difficulties Palios is bound to encounter in the next few months. Indeed, some say that his stand on Ferdinand makes his early demise inevitable. By taking on United and Arsenal, and now the players' war chief, Taylor, it is argued that he, like Cromwell before him, has created not the grounds for progress but a bloody civil war. If this proves to be the case, one can only hope that on the side of right there is no reluctance to charge the muskets.

Better, of course, if all parties except the FA retreated and took stock. If anything is to work for a better, more respectable future for the national game, however, there is one prerequisite. It is that Palios doesn't give an inch in the Ferdinand case. It was an outrageous offence, and it doesn't really matter whether it happened because Ferdinand is congenitally irresponsible or, as some of his defenders imply, just plain thick. What happened when he left the FA drug testers in favour of a mission to a shopping mall, while his clubmates performed their duty, was the creation of the test case of FA resolve to fight an epidemic of indiscipline.

Now that the challenge has been met, it cannot be compromised. Anything less than a hefty ban - say a minimum of six games - will be the signal that bullying pressure from the big guns still works.

Some will say that the call is for Ferdinand to be a scapegoat - as a sick, and rattled Brian Clough was when the FA Premiership bung inquiry took an age to produce nothing but the skimpiest of window dressing - but the argument is nonsense. The reality is that Ferdinand has committed a serious and fundamental offence against football discipline. He should not be a scapegoat but a starting point, and certainly his crime and punishment should be in the context of a much wider need to supervise the game properly.

If this is ever to be achieved, it could be that Government intervention is required, but in the meantime Palios has at least suggested that in some quarters of the game there is still a will to bring in necessary reforms... and a little iron. So far Palios's execution has plainly been less than perfect. He should have taken a more public and central and stronger position when the strike threat was unfolding, but the overwhelming support for his stand, both in the media and with the public, is surely an encouragement to a bolder style.

In the meantime, the public debate might be sharpened in certain areas. One sticking point is the overwhelming public perception that the players are vastly overpaid and irredeemably degenerate. This is an oversimplification as gross as any Premiership pay-cheque. Some players go off the rails. It happens. Judges and cabinet ministers get caught in situations which might bring a blush to the majority of young footballers, but that doesn't provoke a demand for pay-cuts - or blanket suspicion.

We operate in a free market and players fill the stadiums and win the television contracts, and it is only in the last decade or so that they have working terms which give them rights enjoyed by everybody else in a free society.

It is the greed and the ambition of clubs which first set us along the road to current pay-scales, and in any assessment of who takes what from the game we shouldn't forget the rewards of men like Martin Edwards at Manchester United, Sir Alan Sugar at Tottenham, Ken Bates at Chelsea, Sir John "Mr Newcastle" Hall, Ron Noades at Crystal Palace and Sam Hammam at Wimbledon. It would be instructive to have some final accounting of quite how much they put in, and how much they have taken out. No doubt David Beckham's entire income from Old Trafford, which ended with his £28m transfer to Real Madrid, would be engulfed by the black ink.

It means that if we want to look at the crisis of football we shouldn't just pick our spots.

We shouldn't just trawl the late night drinking dives of the West End. Inevitably, that will turn up examples of sheer bad professionalism - and, we have seen recently, possibly a lot worse. But the important thing is not that some young football plutocrats destroy themselves - it will always happen in every walk of life - but that the national game operates with a set of rules that are enforced, even-handedly, on and off the field. The players can have their wealth - it is their right, as it is that of Madonna and Sir Elton John and every fleeting pop star who grabs his little bit of fame - but it has to come with a responsibility that from time to time is powerfully enforced.

The most surreal aspect of last week's debate was that so few of the participants recognised that Rio Ferdinand was not an innocent who had to be proved guilty. His case was opened and shut. This made the advocacy of the rebels leader Gary Neville as redundant as it was puerile.

Now Palios has to move forward the battleground. He has to draw strength from the fact that he has struck a powerful chord. No doubt a little patience is required. No doubt he believes that his back already resembles that of a porcupine. But even if he fell tomorrow, the victim of a putsch as crude as the one that disposed of Crozier, his contribution to English football could be seen to have been considerable.

His achievement has been to draw a line through all the snivelling self-interest. Circumstances have enabled him to take on the two biggest powers in English football, United and Arsenal, and with public backing. He seized the moment when it was clear that football was in danger of being seen to go publicly mad. Now he must march on at the head of football's New Model Army. He must cut away the rot, and whether he succeeds or not is the game's challenge as much as his. Yes, you could call him the protector... of what is left of the decency of a game abused and misdirected for so long.