Just putting our performance aside, I found myself yet again frustrated with the fouls for/against situation. This isnt the only time I have had my suspicions about abrasive teams such as porto who have a couple of dirty players in their team getting an easy ride versus City.
Maybe porto should lobby for that ref from last night to be able to officiate their league games too after giving just FOUR decisions against them during last nights game. I did a little search of their league match stats so far this season, and lo and behold their foul counts in their four games so far according to footystats.org were 18, 19, 19, and 20???? Not content with those findings incase I had misread/understood the stats I checked the bbc match reports for all sixteen champions league games this week. Should we be surprised by now to see that porto commited the least fouls of any team in this round of fixtures?
You can call me paranoid for even caring to check this info, but are porto with pepe and a bitchy manager really paragons of fair play just because its us they are playing.I think not, and will be interested to see their foul count in the rest of their group games.
To me this begs a question.....are we reffed differently? I know others on this forum have asked he same and it seems unlikely that uefa can get away with a conserted on pitch campaign against us, but looking back on our cl record, it is littered with contentious decisions. Or maybe the officials are actually subliminally affected by the anti City rhetoric/brand damaging that has been successfully employed by our media and certain parts of footballs governing bodies.
Whatever, it does seem unlikely that we will be winning this competition anytime soon given the above and our form(which can and hopefully will improve), but alas I still think we have yet to win the hearts of those that are in a position to affect our chances before we can win the competition, and I am not sure we can do....or want to do that.
First of all, you are not 'paranoid' for your response to Wednesday night's refereeing performance.
A couple of days prior to the game I spoke on the phone with my sister and we briefly touched on prospects for the game. She has BT Sport and other providers (I don't.. I won't knowingly give my money to Murdoch and the rest of them, being content with watching City at the ground (when we can with Covid!) on the City website and lastly via the (awful) MOTD highlights!) and has a better working knowledge of European teams than I do. She mentioned that Porto were an 'aggressive side' and she expected a tough game, given what she'd seen of them on tv, hoping that we wouldn't sustain any further injuries/knocks to impact on our already dreadful start to the season.
Her comments were proven correct. Porto should probably have had several yellow cards and certainly should have had a greater foul count against them. Further, I was surprised by the amount of play-acting that went on from the Porto side as well as the team's aggressive approach, all in the name of conning the referee and breaking up City's rhythm.
But the main concern I had as the game wore on was the referee's performance. I have no idea what was running through the bloke's head but some of his decisions were baffling. And when you place what was evidenced on Wednesday night against the numbers analysis of Porto's recent games that you provide, the question has to be asked 'How can this happen in this way?' - how could a team with such a recent record and such obviously aggressive tactics get away with repetitive fouling and cheating behaviour?
We've seen this kind of refereeing performance happen so many times over recent years, with City being clamped down upon immediately for any foul whereas the opposition, both at home and in Europe, is treated much more leniently. And it doesn't have to be inconsistency regarding fouls committed.. remember when Ederson was booked for time-wasting a couple of years back after City took a late lead at home, taking time over a goal-kick to run down the clock, when the opposition 'keeper had been doing exactly the same since minute-one without any sanction?
So, again.. no, you're not paranoid. None of us has or will ever have any hard evidence of an anti-City stance by officials at UEFA, match officials, the media or whoever. But it's there. It's been overt with the assaults on our club via UEFA/FFP; the Premier League letters/communications from the 'Big 4'; the media complicity with these attacks, culminating in its indifference to the recently revealed racist attack on our 'Terrorist' executive and so on.
At the same time it's been there too, subliminally at least, on the pitch with the way officials have handled many important games we've been involved in. For me, Wednesday night's bizarre refereeing performance is but the latest example of this stuff we have to put up with on occasion..