Football: Reed reports Ginola over celebration

DAVID GINOLA may have lit up the FA Cup on Tuesday with his superb winner for Tottenham at Barnsley, but the referee Mike Reed was unimpressed by his subsequent display of chest-baring (or vest-baring, in fact), and has reported him to the Football Association for "over-elaborate goal celebrations".

The Frenchman reacted to his strike - a contender for goal of the season - by running to the Spurs fans, taking his shirt off and throwing it to the crowd.

The controversial Reed said: "This sort of thing can be dangerous if people start to surge forward. The police have constantly told us to keep the players on the pitch when they are celebrating goals. I realise it was a brilliant goal but we are under instructions to report anything we feel is over the top."

David Pleat, Tottenham's director of football, was unimpressed. "Maybe Mr Reed should have noted that David was celebrating in front of his own fans. He didn't drop his shorts, he didn't show his backside, the shirt was thrown back to him and the game restarted at the time it should have done. Maybe Mr Reed wished he had scored the goal."

Despite the unfavourable report, Ginola is unlikely to be punished. FA sources yesterday indicated that the worst he can expect is a letter of warning.

Well used to producing the unexpected on the pitch, Ginola did much the same off it yesterday when he said he will model himself on George Graham if he takes up management. "If I became a manager then I would follow George Graham's philosophy of football," he said.

"The best managers in the world know that the idea [of football] is to build the team from the defence. I remember when I played in Paris for PSG that we got a lot of criticism because we didn't score many goals. But at the end of the season we won the title.

"If you keep a clean sheet then there is always the possibility of you scoring one goal and winning. So I would build from the back and have players like myself up front - that would be very nice."

Ginola's next aim will be to take Tottenham to victory over Leicester City in the Worthington Cup final on Sunday. The Frenchman represents the biggest threat to Leicester's chances of winning the competition for the second time in three years, but Martin O'Neill, the Foxes' manager, is still to decide whether his team will man-mark Ginola.

Pontus Kaamark did well when he was deployed to combat the influence of Juninho in the two encounters with Middlesbrough in 1997, but the Swede has not been a regular for Leicester's first team this season.

"Juninho was playing brilliantly at the time and the comparisons are obvious, with Ginola playing out of his skin at the moment," O'Neill said yesterday. "The two play in different roles and different positions but the parallels are there. But today is the first day I've really thought about the game, with the media attention we're getting.

"Ginola is clever enough to wangle his way out of any situation but we'll certainly have a talk about it. The guy is world class and I'd love him to be playing with us rather than against us. But that's not going to happen, so we'll have to get on with it. Pontus played Juninho very well and played him fairly but there were periods in the Middlesbrough games which people forget when Juninho got himself clear."