Mossley Defeat

Well that was grim. Apart from the penalty I don't think we had a single shot on target. They weren't exactly world beaters either. Doubley disappointing to be beaten so easily.

That referee got nearly every decision wrong in that game and cost each team about £80 in fines for his ridiculous bookings. Hopefully he's never allowed to referee at this level again. Thankfully, his worst decisions were awarding us a penalty and their sending off.

All in all...pretty glad to go home from that one.

Just seen Wayne Rooney dive in the box against Leicester...referee gave no penalty and no booking.

One rule for some...

And Steven Gerrard NEVER did anything like that......did he ?????

sparrows left peg wrote:And Steven Gerrard NEVER did anything like that......did he ?????

What has that got to do with Lancaster City?

The problem with the ref wasn't his decision-making about fouls, penalties - that wasn't any worse than we usually see.  I think he called all four penalty / no penalty incidents correctly except for Russell's second yellow.

When Russell may (or may not) have dived the correct decision was no penalty, no card - the situation just wasn't clear-cut enough.  And I saw it close up.

Unfortunately, having given Mercer a yellow card (correctly) in the second minute, the ref then seemed to feel he had to go on giving cards left, right and centre.  You see that quite often with refs - as soon as they produce one card it becomes so much easier to produce another, and another, etc.

And even with all the cards he clearly couldn't control the match, which got progressively tetchier with a few player-on-player confrontations.  With a decent ref these wouldn't have happened.

So I agree he had a bad afternoon - but not because of the penalty calls.

Anyway, it wasn't the ref that lost us the match.  We were really poor.  And one of our players spent half of the time looking as though he didn't want to be playing.  Every time he lost the ball (which was most of the time) he would just stop and sulk for a few seconds rather than getting on with the game.  Not acceptable.

But it wasn't just one player - most of our players had a poor game.  The early goal, with Hale making an uncharacteristic error (how did that goal go in?), seemed to deflate everybody.

Agree that the referee, though card happy, didn't cost us the match. That was down to a wretched performance. Phil will need to shake a few people to get us firing again. Come on lads, you are well capable of performing. Let's see you at your best again.