Usually, I think your "PIGMOL" conspiracy theories are dumb, same as I think of every other PL team supporter and their fantasies. But the refereeing tonight was so bad that it bugged the hell out of me even as a neutral. The lack of yellow card (well, red card, really) for Casemiro was insane and the amount of injury time was outrageous (plus blowing before even 3 minutes of it were up in extra time). It's no wonder teams engage in timewasting - my least favourite thing in all of football, above even diving - when it's so thoroughly rewarded. Well-conducted studies of injury time vs actual countable stoppages according to the laws of the game consistently find that injury time is less than 50% of what it should be (and, in extreme cases, usually at the tail end, often a third or less; halves with >10 minutes of injury time shouldn't actually be uncommon according to the laws of the game). I happened to be casually monitoring the second half of extra time (because I was watching a recording and could skip stoppages) and I got nearly 5 mins of countable stoppages (which should've been rounded up to 5), so of course the whistle blows on 02:49 or whatever it was. Finally, the 50/50 decisions were pretty wildly in RM's favour too.
I mean, in terms of probability and statistics, even with an overall equal distribution of reffing mistakes across all matches, there are just some games in which one team is going to get reamed through pure chance. And this was probably one of those, rather than any kind of organised conspiracy, but it still fucking sucked. As a patriotic, PL-supporting football fan, I badly wanted that all-England final yet again, and for the dominance of the PL on the continent to continue.
ETA: Plus, despite my neutral status, Liverpool are lowkey my least favourite team in the PL and I have an irrational dislike of Salah -- possibly because he gets more individual awards than Kane, who I like, and sometimes robs him in direct competition, purely because the former plays for a big team and is African (making him eligible for all kinds of extra awards, and granting him bonus points in this post-BLM/CRT/whatever era). Sidebar: Kane badly needs to GTFO of Spurs; he got absolutely robbed in not winning a single major POTS last season despite his Golden Boot/Playmaker double (KdB was great too, tbf, but I thought Kane was better, and, regardless, no way was he not good enough to get one major POTS out of 3 or 4 on offer). I was literally (almost literally) praying for Kane to get a City transfer last summer -- I think it would've been great for both parties and that the league would already be done by now if City had him. Anyway, a RM vs Liverpool final is kinda weak. I'll be supporting Liverpool more out of a sense of duty than any real sentiment. In fact, I might not even watch it. IDK.
