A belated attack of midsummer madness appears to have taken over — temporarily one trusts — the soccer scene. In recent weeks we’ve had the sight, in the English league, of Jermain Defoe taking a bite out of Javier Mascherano’s arm (“I was shocked,” said Mascherano. “Won’t happen again,” said Defoe, who was not penalized for the nibble); we’ve had a ball boy scoring a winning goal in Brazil, and in Spain there was an embarrassing call by a referee’s assistant who awarded a penalty kick for an incident that occurred a good two yards outside the penalty area — doubly embarrassing that one, as the assistant admitted that he is studying to qualify as an optician.

Further evidence of strange behavior came last week from Australia, where it was reported that FIFA president Sepp Blatter had appeared on a Sydney television station and apologized to Australian soccer fans for a penalty kick that was awarded against the Socceroos (the Australian national team) during the World Cup last July. Italy scored the only goal of the game from that penalty kick and went on to become World Champions, while the aggrieved Socceroos went home. Blatter, it was reported, said: “I would like to apologize to our soccer fans in Australia….The Socceroos should have gone into the quarterfinals in place of Italy.”

Odd indeed, made even odder by the implied criticism of the referee who made the call, as Blatter, only five days earlier, had told a referees’ group: “I am very satisfied with the referees’ performances at the 2006 World Cup.”

Too odd, in fact, to be true. Yesterday, Blatter issued a press release in which he refuted “misleading media quotes,” and quoted Les Murray, the editorial supervisor of SBS Sport , as saying that “the topic as to whether the controversial penalty kick awarded to Italy in the last moments of the game was justified or not never even came up during the interview.”

There were no denials — well, there haven’t been so far — of another remarkable public apology, this one in Argentina. Believe me, this sort of thing is almost unheard of in the modern game. Julio Grondona, the longtime president of the Argentine federation, was incensed by the violent play of the Argentine club team Gimnasia-La Plata in its Copa Sudamericana game against Chile’s Colo-Colo. So incensed that he penned an apology to the Chileans: “This is a letter that I never wanted to write, but noblesse oblige. I could not avoid a powerful feeling of shame. The elemental principles of fair play …should never be overlooked in favor of the result. To remain silent would be to condone something we repudiate and reject.”

At least justice was done in this instance, for Gimnasia lost the game and was eliminated from the competition.

Another form of justice was evoked last week in France. This was a case that cut through the eccentricities I’ve been talking about and brought the sport firmly back to the ground of reality. It raised an issue that bedevils soccer, one that has never been satisfactorily resolved.

In a Ligue 1 game on October 14 the Paris Saint-Germain striker Pierre-Alain Frau tackled and seriously injured the Sedan midfielder Stephane Noro. The tackle left Noro with a cruciate knee ligament rupture that will keep him inactive for an estimated six months.

After reviewing the incident, the league’s disciplinary committee announced on Friday that Frau would be suspended for two months. There has long been a school of opinion in soccer that when a player seriously injures another, he should be banned from playing until his injured opponent returns to the field.

This eye-for-an-eye argument seems fair to many people, but it is one that can only be justified if the culprit can be shown to have intentionally harmed his opponent.

The original soccer rules of 1863 contained no reference to intention, for it was evidently considered unthinkable that the amateur gentlemen players of that era would ever commit a foul intentionally. That idyllic world did not last long. The game quickly professionalized, and, starting in 1893, the rules listed a number of actions (e.g. tripping, holding, pushing) that were to be adjudged as fouls if committed intentionally. For more than 100 years referees were saddled with the task of working out what was intentional — they were being asked, in effect, to read the players’ minds. That burden was removed in 1995 when the rules were reworded, banishing the idea of intention (except for handling of the ball), and requiring instead that the fouls be committed in a manner considered by the referee “to be careless, reckless or using excessive force.”

But the idea of intent will not go away, and it has resurfaced in the Frau case. Said the French disciplinary committee: “We took into account the fact that Frau was not a violent player and did not tackle Noro with the intention to injure him … had the tackle been intentional, the [two month] ban would have been increased.”

Needless to say, Frau’s club Paris Saint-Germain found the ban “excessive,”and announced that it reserved the right to appeal. The success or failure of any appeal would hinge, not on the meaning of intent — already ruled out by the committee — but presumably on a definition of careless, reckless, or excessive force. This sounds almost like a distinction without a difference, for defining those words has already proved almost as big a problem for referees as pinning down intent.

As the sport becomes increasingly physical, there is an urgent need for clear guidance on what is permissible and what is not, like that given by FIFA at this summer’s World Cup when referees were ordered to clamp down on use of the elbows. This was a big success, according to FIFA’s chief medical officer, Jiri Dvorak, who has reported that head injuries resulting from use of the elbows showed a 50% reduction when compared with figures for the 2002 World Cup.

Excellent news, but one is left wondering why a specially ordained clampdown is necessary before referees act concertedly to reduce what has always been an obviously dangerous aspect of soccer — whether or not it’s intentional, or reckless, or careless, or involves excessive force. Perhaps that is the true madness of soccer: a failure to identify its self-destructive elements.