Wayne Campbell, the president of Western Stars Sports Club, has hit out at the Bermuda Football Association decision to reject the appeal against a five-year ban that was handed to Treadwell Gibbons Jr in the spring.

Western Stars, under whose auspices the football team Dandy Town fall, are upset over the length of the ban given to Gibbons and will do whatever possible to have the sentence reduced.

“We have met on it [the BFA ruling] and I don’t think this is over,” Campbell said of his executive committee’s options. “We are looking at other avenues because I feel the ban is too excessive.

“It is too excessive considering what’s going on around the world and the fact you can bite or kick people and get four months or a ten-game ban or whatever. Five years for an amateur, and for what he has done, I think it was too excessive. I have seen people do worse during my playing days. Nothing happened; they still played.”

David Sabir, the BFA general secretary, declined to comment on the matter when contacted by The Royal Gazette, which has repeatedly requested the terms of reference that the independent disciplinary committee used when dealing with Gibbons.

It remains unclear what course of action Western Stars are contemplating to have Gibbons’s ban reduced, but one avenue potentially open to them is to present the case to the Sport Ministry’s Alternate Dispute Resolution arbitration panel.

Gibbons was banned for his conduct in last season’s FA Cup Final between Dandy Town and North Village at the National Sports Centre.

The goalkeeper ran from his goal into the opponents’ half of the field to get involved in an altercation between team-mate Zaire Burchall and Jason Davis, of North Village.

All three players were subsequently sent off, with the BFA disciplinary committee coming down hardest on Gibbons, who was punished for making physical contact with Davis. Burchall was served with a four-game suspension and Davis a two-match ban and 12-month probation.

Gibbons, who had become an enfante terrible of sorts after bringing Cup Match into disrepute barely six months earlier and whose actions mostly prompted the reintroduction a Code of Conduct for this year’s Annual Classic, committed his transgression in front of a watching crowd that included BFA hierarchy and Bermuda Government officials.