OK, so for all sorts of prejudiced social reasons, I don’t like Chelsea, but despite my view of the two significant refereeing decisions, I do believe they deserved to beat Man U yesterday, who despite Rooney’s hard work just didn’t have the strike power. And I don’t have any time for Sir Alex’s rantings about fouls awarded or not – the cases in point were debatable, matters of the referee’s perspective.
Booking Drogba ? 100% right. OK so he was fouled and he didn’t feign injury, and yes Fletch deserved a card more than once yesterday, but Drogba feigned imminent death in full view of referee and the rest of the world. A bookable offence. Referee correct.
Terry’s goal ? 100% wrong. Drogba was clearly interfering with play right in front of the keeper – in full view of the referee’s assistant. Van der Saar didn’t even dive till Drogba had failed to kick it, he was covering Drogba’s strike. 100% offside, no goal. Referee’s assistant wrong, referee correct.
The referee did nothing wrong.
[Note : Psybertron is primarily about right and wrong in action. Chelsea FC are just an interesting source of contentious decisions – a high-profile case-study of individual, social and authority based ethics. But, yes, I do care about football too.]