I agree, to a certain extent, and your explanation is how people who haven't seen our matches would explain it away (not for one minute saying that you fall into this category); BUT when you see fair tackles which win the ball back CONSISTENTLY being given as fouls against us in almost every match you begin to wonder; even more so when VERY similar incidents perpetrated by the opposition which could/should be given in our favour get waved away.
Last night's performance certainly raised eyebrows amongst us fans, and that's understandable due to our tribalism, but when our players (Rodri, Bernardo, Zinchenko, Jesus and Fern from memory) are visibly exasperated and even openly laughing at his decisions against us as well as those NOT given for us (on many, many occasions yesterday), the penny kinda drops that something just isn't sitting right.
Dean's performance yesterday strayed beyond just being a "homer ref" IMO.
Can we nail our answers to Mike Deans head??Answers on a postcard:
When a fair minded Lady such as yourself is calling him out Eccles, it’s way beyond a reasonable doubt he is indeed all three of those choices … ! As well as being an utter twat with a capital CPlease may I vote for all three of those options. The man is a biased, incompetent, bent, cowardly, little joke of a man!
That’s me being nice to him. :-)
As someone else said, he's an absolute Homer of a ref. His decision making completely affected the flow of the game and we ended up suffering periods of pressure as a result.
Corruption dressed up as incompetence usually, but he went over the top last night and made it obvious.He made calls for us when he could have given them the other way. I think he just had a bad game.
@Metalartin think of the James Milner fouls when we played the dips. The first, a straight red ruins the product, sorry rest of the game. The 3rd foul, second booking and it ruins the last 15 minutes of end to end football, aka the product.I never thought of it like that but maybe you're on to something.
There were a couple of opportunities to completely do City over, if that's what his aim was. Gerrard made a claim for the weakest penalty decision of the season(still not quite sure which incident it was). The commentators also seemed to think, Mings purposely running around the front of Ederson and backing/barging into him with his back. To move him out of the way/stop him getting to the ball, was fair game. That might have lead to something, if it was allowed to continue.
So, rather than trying to outright rob City, maybe he was "enhancing the product". All the small decisions were going to Aston Villa, for long periods of the second half. To help them build up some momentum and hinder any of ours, while our players were also starting to show fatigue. Still no less annoying either way though.