https://www.thefa.com/football-rule.../football-11-11/law-12---fouls-and-misconduct
I’m reading this one. The one you’re quoting is an additional guidance to the referees, but I still don’t see that there can’t be any leeway in terms of the force used.
As I’ve mentioned before, the only anatomical parts of the body specifically mentioned in the laws of the game is striking an opponent in the head or face, and even then there’s the caveat that it’s not a red card if the force is negligible.
If hair pulling was an automatic red and no circumstance (like accidentally catching the hair in a jostling situation, or pulling with little force), we wouldn’t have had Howard Webb defending the decision to give a yellow card for the Bournemouth player when Cucurella was
forcefully dragged back by his hair when running full speed forward. If this is a red card for Martinez then it has to be preceded by Webb saying it was a mistake to hand out a yellow to the Bournemouth player, which he didn’t. He defended the decision and said the ref has the right to give a yellow for whatever reason, for a hair pull that was orders of magnitudes more forceful than what we saw here.
And the obvious response I’m going to get to this is that people are going to say ”well he’s given the ref the chance to make a decision by getting his hand in contact with DCL’s hair”, but if the ref used every opportunity to send someone off that they could we’d be seeing red cards for verbal abuse for players saying ”feck off” after getting a decision against them and nobody would accept that (I fecking hope, at least).
It’s an extremely soft red card that can be supported by some of the rules (but not all the prerequisites because it’s not off the ball, it’s not even a clear pulling motion and it’s not forceful), it’s not a missed incident because the ref’s looking at it, so it should be subject to the same clear and obvious threshold that has been used to deny numerous penalties for clear fouls against us (Amad, Yoro to name a few recent incidents).
The ref doesn’t automatically need to give a red card as soon as there’s hand-to-hair contact as evidenced by the refereeing chief’s comments but he has chosen to do so by hiding behind a law that’s far from clear while saying ”well look mate the hand is touching the hair and that’s an automatic red” which I have already proven is false going by Webb’s comments.