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Thursday's hearing would not have ended this long, complicated saga but would have started the process of calculating how much West Ham should pay.

That hearing may now not take place for many weeks.

Long before that, in the next day or so, West Ham will go to the Court of Arbitration for Sport and even if Cas do not hear them West Ham remain confident they can overturn this decision.

One of the West Ham arguments is that any compensation violates natural justice, in particular the idea of no double jeopardy. Having paid £5.5m back in 2007 they should not now, nearly two years later, be asked for six times as much for the same alleged crime.

But they also have a more central, call it philosophical, argument: They need to win for the sake of sport.

Otherwise, the argument runs, this will be an invitation for lawyers across the land; chaos will reign and there will be no such thing as decisions arrived at on the field of play, instead in musty court rooms and dingy judges' chambers.

While there is a certain amount of special pleading by West Ham here the whole case does raise enormous questions about sports and law. Namely, how far can lawyers decide sporting issues? Sport has always seen itself as something very special.

Sport likes to talk about its laws, the , the . And if you break them there is but these are rules of a particular trade association, not the laws of the land.

Football may make the a high crime but in ordinary life such poaching goes on all the time and is certainly not illegal.

Sport likes to keep law at bay and sporting organisations such as and make it clear their member associations must not go to the law but must settle all matters within the football family.

All this indicates that there is a delicate balance between sport and law. You can have lawyers operating in sports but they must not derail sport in the process. West Ham will argue that this is just what the Sheffield United judgment has done.

However, even if we concede that it is impossible to say Tevez on his own kept West Ham up, the fact remains that sporting laws work curiously.

Take the case of Antonio Pettigrew the American 400m runner, who was part of the relay team that won gold in Sydney in 2000. Many years later he was found .

Now it is impossible to prove that he and the rest of his team won just because he took drugs but since this is an enormous sporting crime and his medal taken away. But he is not the only one punished. His fellow American medal winners , eight years after winning them.

And if it is impossible to say Tevez kept West Ham up, then how can you say that the US relay team, which included Michael Johnson, only won because they included Pettigrew?
It is a question to which I must confess I do not know the answer.

I would like to think the annual meeting of the , which meets at the on Thursday, will consider this question. But I somehow doubt it.

We must resign ourselves to the reality that the influence of lawyers in sport, in all its maddening complexities, will grow and the Sheffield Untied case is not the end but the start of something rather new and very uncharted.