WALK down any street in Britain and you will see how important - and influential - football is. Children everywhere wear the strips of the teams they support and associate with, and they often wear the names of the individual players that they idolise.

Roy Keane is among the most idolised of all players. He is the captain of the country's biggest club, Manchester United, and he is one of the very best players of his generation.

But this should not make him above the law.

On Saturday, Keane committed an assault on the Sunderland player Jason McAteer. He was undoubtedly provoked - but that is no defence. It is just a mitigating circumstance.

Yesterday, two charges of bringing the game into disrepute were laid against Keane by the Football Association. These were related to his new book in which Keane admits a premeditated assault against another player, Alf Inge Haaland. For that, there is no defence.

But Keane looks likely to escape all punishment. As soon as Manchester United saw the inevitable ban looming, Keane was immediately sent to have an operation. The player, therefore, will be physically unable to play while he is serving his ban. It is no punishment at all.

Such a cynical ploy from United is hugely disappointing. But then it comes from a club whose manager withdrew a player, Paul Scholes, from the England squad on Monday saying he was injured but played him on Tuesday in a club match against Middlesbrough. United manager Sir Alex Ferguson yesterday said that Scholes is injured but needed a game. If the recovering player really did need a game to help regain match fitness, surely a gentle 45-minute run-out in a friendly for England would have been better for him than a 90-minute work-out in a fierce Premiership match for United?

But this is a club which now seems to think that is bigger than country - and Keane exemplified this when walking out on his own country during the World Cup - and that its players are above the law.

The Football Association has to find an imaginative way of punishing Keane for his violent, vengeful actions.

It has to find a way of stopping the game that so many adults love being brought so low, and it has to find a way of stopping players that so many children idolise and copy from using unlawful violence on the pitch.

The FA has to protect the game, because if football cannot adequately police itself, just like doctors, solicitors and even newspapers, it will have a policing system imposed upon it. It will have police on every corner arresting violent players like Keane.

At least if he were in prison - as any other person who had such a record for violent assault would be - he would be unable to play the game. He would be being punished.