Apart from the fact the sprite fails to recognise the command a few other things that are related can happen.

1) You can keep animating and get stuck animating the "give command to sprite" not being able to do anything till you press enter (open chat)

2) The sprite can go into an autofire mode where as soon as the cooldown stops he'll do the last command you were trying to make him do.

It could be packet loss or something but it's worse if i'm lagging more, I play from australia which is a problem but the game is playable even there (pvp is very difficult but thats not going to get better), sprite commands seem to be different somehow.