If you have ever played the game at any organised level you know the impact a biased/seemingly biased referee can have, and the building sense of frustration that comes when every foul from them is treated as a hard tackle and every hard tackle your team puts in is a foul. When every time you want the advantage he blows for a foul and every time you want the foul he plays an advantage. I remember yelling at a ref because I had played a pass that went out just after I had been fouled and he had played an advantage. “You shouldn’t have put it in Row Z then” was what he said. The next thing he did was book me because I called him a blind ****.
You get that sense within 10-15 minutes of kick off and there is nothing you can do about it. The other side know it, too. They know when they will get away with snide shots like Rudiger’s. And when it’s like that unless you are streets ahead of the opposition you usually lose. All the 50/50s seem to go one way, and quite a few 60/40s. And because you are angry and frustrated, you lash out either with your feet or your tongue, and you get booked, like I did.
Of course at that level they are highly trained professionals and should not react. But they are human.
I agree with this completely.
In every press conference in the build up to the game Pep was asked questions about both his and City's history with this referee, I've never seen that happen before with even the press noting some of the 'inconsistencies' and 'controversies' in ours and Pep's games involving him.
On Saturday we were set up and played as a team that was only interested in keeping possession and not in winning it back, I feel like we went out onto the pitch knowing that we couldn't be as aggressive in the tackle as Chelsea and Chelsea probably knew this within the first 5 minutes of the game too.
The majority of the players who played on Saturday also played in the ridiculously bent Liverpool tie that he 'officiated' and this would have undoubtedly been in the players minds during the game.
That's not to take anything away from Chelsea though, they set up in a way that is incredibly difficult to play against and executed their game plan perfectly. What we needed after the first 20 minutes or so was one of our players to get the message out that we needed to play our normal game, close the opposition down like we normally do and make a real effort to win the ball back as we have done the majority of this season. Unfortunately, once Chelsea went one up it didn't matter how quick to close down or tackle we were they were always going to put 10 men in their own box as that's how they play against us. When they took out our biggest threat to these deep organised defences in Kev they had the game sewn up.
Regardless of how Lahoz performed in Saturdays game I 100% believe that with any other referee in charge we wouldn't have put out a team with no holding midfielder, especially as we've only done that only once before this entire season.
In any big game against a top team you need your players fully focused on their jobs and on the opposition, somethings gone very wrong when you feel (rightly or wrongly) that you can't play your normal game because the biggest obstacle to your success is the supposedly impartial referee.
