toffee balls
Well-Known Member
For the first time in well over ten years I had to listen to the game on the OS radio feed and the match day centre. Jack Dearden was horrified and astonished at Mason's performance: The Goat was much calmer but no less incredulous. The Goat felt that Ferna's tackle could be seen as a red card IF YOU WANTED TO SEE IT THAT WAY. At other times Mason chose not to apply the full rigour of the regulations and at other times not to apply the regulations at all. Pep gave his press conference and was roundly condemned for what he said, and a rabble of pious, self-righteous pundits jumped in to preach on the text of not having the right to expect the decisions to go your way all the time. Martin Keown put on his best Old Testament beard and harangued us all in the Daily Mail.
The trouble is, Martin, that if your name is Rojo you DO get the decisions all the time. You do worse than Ferna's lunge and get away with it. There's no possibility of retrospective action either. If you are "Zlats" you can elbow people in the face, even knock teeth out and never face action. A kick in the head is "nothing worth looking into." If things are getting a bit dodgy your players will never be offside. I believed from 2012 that City had to be 10 points better than United to finish ahead of them and it's getting worse.
I have never believed that there is anything that should make a coach a paedophile but I see clearly that paedophiles may find coaching young boys and girls attractive. We see now the damage done by the craven attitude of the FA. Similarly there is nothing which should make referees favour United but I can see that United fan's would want to be referees. We have a generation of referees who grew up when United ruled the roost. And a generation of pundits brought up on United, media studies and WWE, and now they can't tell one from the other. This has been made worse by the undue influence United have always exerted at the higher levels of the FA, which has now spread to UEFA. Platini handed FFP over to United! City were stitched up over FFP, that failed and now we're being stitched up by the refs. And not just us: yesterday Klopp was complaining. His complaints were easy to dismiss as paranoia but what he said was familiar- no wildly inaccurate decisions but a large number of them to keep Liverpool on the back foot. I have always found Klopp a very astute, good humoured and,above all, fair manager. We all know that particular referee. Liverpool dropped 2 points: West Ham had Fengouli sent off for a lunge by Phil "the face " Jones and United were given a goal to make the game safe when any of three players, including the scorer, were clearly offside! "No team ever gets all the decisions all the time, Pep."
The FA's response to this shows all the contemptuous arrogance of UEFA and FIFA. "We do as we please. Put up with it. We see the PL as the best in the world and we protect its 'biggest' club. We are accountable to no-one." This is the state of English football. Welcome to the PL, Pep.
Bravo , nail on head once again.