The Preston forward Milutin Osmajic may face a lengthy ban after allegedly biting Blackburn defender Owen Beck in their Lancashire derby on Sunday.
The flashpoint took place after Beck, on loan from Liverpool, was himself shown a red card in the dying moments of the 0-0 draw for kicking Duane Holmes. In the aftermath of the sending off, video footage appeared to show Osmajic biting Beck.
The Blackburn manager, John Eustace, was incensed. “He’s got a big bite mark on the back of his neck,” he said of Beck. “It’s a shame the referee didn’t see that. He’s shown all the lads. He’s a little bit quiet, a little bit shook up. It’s a very serious incident, no one likes to be bitten. Everyone’s angry about it.
“I’m sure the right people will see it and we’ll take it from there.”
The Preston manager, Paul Heckingbottom, said: “There’s no place for [biting]. Mistimed tackles, things like that are part and parcel of the game, you accept them. Anything that is not has to be dealt with.”
It was a bad-tempered encounter, with Preston’s Sam Greenwood also sent off for a two-footed challenge in the first half.
Osmajic, 25, a Montenegrin, joined Preston from Cadiz for £2.5m last year.
In 2013, Liverpool’s Luis Suárez was given a 10-match ban for biting Chelsea’s Branislav Ivanovic. Last week, Wrexham’s Paul Mullin denied biting the leg of Birmingham’s Alex Cochrane in their League One clash.
On the rest of the match, Heckingbottom felt his team did well to manage the game in different ways and even suggested the Greenwood sending-off may have made life harder for their opponents.
“We controlled the first half with the ball without having enough opportunities or getting behind them enough or getting enough clear-cut chances from the possession that we had,” he said.
Eustace revealed his own annoyance at his side. “We didn’t create enough in the final third when they were down to 10 men,” he said. “That’s something we have to work on. We still had the best chance of the game. We limited them in the first half to no chances at all, apart from the header in the last minute, from which [Aynsley Pears] pulled a good save off. It’s a local derby. Form and quality kind of goes out of the window.”
