Neville Dalton is a journalist with the BBC News website and a
Another hammer blow for football
The almost universal condemnation of Ben Thatcher's violent attack on Pedro Mendes and the messages of support and sympathy for our little gem of a midfield man have gone a little way towards restoring my faith in football, its participants and followers.
Supporters of clubs all over the country – including Southampton's and diehard Manchester City fans - have been quick to join our own in expressing their outrage at the cowardly, vicious (why do those words fit so well together?) attack.
And the general consensus is that Thatcher should receive a stiff ban (and a bit more, according to some of our less restrained supporters), regardless of the current laws on retrospective punishments.
I'm confident that between the FA and the police Thatcher will get some sort of come-uppance. Whether the punishment fits the crime remains to be seen.
The irony is, a ban – even a season-long one – would raise barely an eyebrow among many City followers, some of whom had been critical of the full-back's approach to the game even before Wednesday night's assault.
There are many who would like their club to get rid of Thatcher and his right-sided “double”, Danny Mills, because of the way they play the game and the liability that their high foul counts represent.
While they may be in raptures at Paul Dickov's annoying, aggressive, provocative approach to the game (the sort of style that so enrages opposition fans but imbues many with a grudging sense of envy), most have enough of a sense of fair play to know when they've got a rotten apple among their number.
Thatcher has “previous” – and enough red and yellow cards and a high enough foul count for even the most myopic of supporters to want to distance themselves from him.
Sorry not enough
So I was a bit disappointed to say the least that their revered and highly respected manager, Stuart Pearce, did not see fit to condemn his player straight after the match, or take the trouble to watch a replay immediately so that he was in a position to condemn the incident which he surely knew was going to throw a huge spotlight on his club.
Pearce was a hard man, who played with no little aggression but also with a sense of fairness.
I have a great deal of respect for the refreshingly open approach he has brought to the cut-throat business of football management.
Such an honest and decent man would surely have been as outraged as the rest of us when he saw the assault in all its gory.
He should have watched a replay at the earliest possible moment and condemned the act publicly as soon as he could.
The apology published on the club's official website has its heart in the right place (though what else could it have done in the face of such blatant violence?).
But in a matter of such obvious public interest, in an arena under a spotlight as enormous as Premiership football's, the club could – and should – have been more open than just saying that the matter has been dealt with internally.
For me, it wasn't just the violence – it was the clear pre-meditation of the act and the unbelievably arrogant stance he took after doing the deed as he showed obvious disdain and a lack of concern as Glen Johnson fleetingly remonstrated with him in the immediate aftermath of the carnage he had wrought.
Just watch that replay one more time and look at Thatcher's snarling mouth as he struts away from the scene of his crime.
It is particularly ironic that the victim of such violence should be such an apparently mild-mannered, unassuming man who plays the game hard but fair, with integrity and with flair – attributes that Thatcher will never have.
Pompey fans itching for Thatcher's appearance in the reverse fixture next year need not get too worked up.
I doubt very much whether Thatcher will still be playing for
Let's hope that long before then, Pedro Mendes, one of the best players to wear a Pompey shirt for decades, is fully recovered and back to his talented best on the pitch.
As for Thatcher, whatever the authorities decide to do with him, we need to be confident that a man capable of such sickening, unprovoked, violence will never do so again.