A tweet from Davide Somma revealing he has ruptured his anterior cruciate ligament and will be out of action for up to six months has infuriated Simon Grayson and led to the Leeds United manager banning his players from the social networking service.

The club have justified the move by claiming the leaked news will alert other clubs to the fact we’re in the market for a striker, resulting in them upping their asking price.

Personally, I’m not convinced. If you’re in the market for a striker, other clubs are going to realise this when you phone them up asking about the availability of their strikers. You can’t buy a clubs striker without them knowing about it – not in any version of reality I’m aware of anyway.

Maybe this is the problem Leeds United are having signing players? They have a pretty impressive list of potential targets in front of them, but all the best players seem to be attached to clubs. Try as he may, Simon Grayson has not yet figured out how to buy these players secretly without telling the other club. Unfortunately, this means Leeds United are limited to unattached players on free transfers.

The Twitter ban itself is a little over the top in my opinion. I’ve personally found that football players are the most boring people on earth, but it was nice to see them using the service to interact with fans. Banning players from doing this is indicative of the dictatorship-like regime we currently have at Elland Road.

We already knew Davide Somma was injured as he wasn’t in Scotland with the rest of the squad. He was also spotted in Leeds earlier this week on crutches so this was hardly ground-breaking news he revealed. A cynical person may suggest that it’s simply a management and ownership structure gone mad with control – all news must first be revealed through Radio Bates or the Official Site or the club spits their dummy out.

Whilst Twitter will cope just fine without the inane ramblings of Leeds United players, I don’t like the way in which the club are trying to govern the players personal lives. I understand they are high profile individuals whose actions reflect on the football club and as such, they need to be careful what they do in public. But surely a code of conduct is more realistic than trying to shelter them entirely from the outside world?

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The players may be banned, but you can still follow The Scratching Shed on Twitter. You can also find us on Facebook