Just a quick post to show support for Mark Halsey and his family. I know refs can be a royal pain in the backside but they don't deliberately get it wrong and to pick up the abuse he has on twitter is just wrong. Plain and simple.
Met him in the hotel I work in earlier today, really nice bloke and in my opinion England's best referee.
I understand there is a police investigation for some of the comments on one of the Forums I think it was twitter....don't quote me on that. Just caught the end of some sort of discussion on the car Radio.
I did mention the fact that I was a saints fan and wished him well for tonight's game, but I didn't manage a full conversation with him because I was busy.
Don't know the ref or what kind of a match he had at the weekend, but I always try to look at the bigger picture when it comes to refs having bad games. A player has a bad game, they miss a few passes, give the ball away etc. even get sent off, but there's never a call for them to be sacked, or questions over their suitability to be in the team on the strength of one game. A ref has a bad game and some folk are baying for blood. We all hate bad decisions but every team has benefited from one at one time.
The bloke and his family have been through a lot which is tough, and football fans esp Liverpool are total morons, so this kind of stuff is hardly suprising. I do think he is a terrible ref though, he had an absolute shocker at the weekend
It depends who you listen to! There were calls for Adkins to go on the match thread when you were 1 down against Villa, that's after 2 years of good work, apparently all undone by 4 poor results in a tough league in which 3 of the 4 games were against 3 of the best teams in the league! And with Man Utd its the volume of decisions that goes there way that infuriates people when decisions go their way yet again, and they take their anger out on the referee.
Don't Often fully agree with you.... but on this I totally agree. Liverpool seem to think they have some god given right not to suffer some bad decisions. No Referee deserves what they have dished out.
They were harsh comments but it was 2 individuals. Hardly representative of a whole club that has millions of supporters. Also with the last sentence you make it sound as if he was assaulted on the pitch or something.
It should never get personal ... it's only a game I have so much respect for Halsey after what he's been through
Given the hard/bad feelings between the two clubs involved, I should imagine the Liverpool whingers were protesting that yet again, ManU were getting some kind of favourable decision, at the expense of their own team, who they consider every bit as important. In that case, they were wrong. Those decisions were correct, in any case. We know, as supporters, that there is an undercurrent amongst fans of other teams that ManU seem to get the 50/50 decisions, especially at OT, but occasionally elsewhere, also. There's an entire myth about the subject. By its own nature, the myth elevates ManU and diminishes other teams. Certain Liverpool supporters probably view this as a further diminishment of their club who they see as dropping inch by inch into the alsoran status of football. If I was a Liverpool fan, I'd probably find it all just as gauling. It doesn't excuse any of the comment aimed at Halsey.
He did well enough tonight, got in the way a couple of times, but let the game flow and played the advantage well, no complaints.
Ok it was only two, but reading your last sentence you don't even recognise just how bad they were. Infact there is almost a hint in your two posts of condoning their actions. You almost sound like you are justifying what they did. At a time when the whole of football has got behind the people of your club following the shocking injustice they suffered, I would have expected a complete rejection of any such abusive comments.
