Nope, nothing to do with Big Break... But there are three things I wanted to bring up: I was just looking at how other teams are doing and wondered if we seem to get less luck than them? Leeds seem to be the luckiest team this season - despite the fact they keep selling their best players, they keep managing to get results, yet if you took a star performer out of our side, I doubt we'd keep the good results up as much - so is it luck? Same comparison with strikers, Becchio was their main striker last season and McCormack was hopeless, this season Becchio was out injured and people expected them to struggle and the hopeless McCormack starts banging them in - as you can see with us, when Fryatt isn't putting them away, nobody is - is it luck? I've noticed Leeds seem to have a lot of players sent off against them - has anyone been sent off against us all season? That in amongst other general in-game pieces of luck thrown their way, for example; they had 2 sent off against them at the weekend, the Ipswich goalie a week or so before that, there was their game against Watford where Watford (according to the FLS) had dominated the full 90 minutes, with them missing a penalty in the 90th mimute to make it 2-0... instead Leeds went up the other end and got a soft penalty to draw 1-1, then there was their game against Burnley which they were losing 1-0, til Burnley scored an 88th minute own goal, then Leeds won the game in the 97th minute! Talk about luck! Could you ever see us being that jammy? Nearest I think we'll come all season is Koren's winner against Watford. So, like I said Bristol City had 2 men sent off against Leeds, I bet they don't even get one player carded against us on Saturday. Ref's don't seem to like booking people against us, giving us fouls or penalties either. Other teams get a lot of luck too, like West Ham seem to get a heck of a lot of penalties and Blackpool seem to keep popping up despite having inconsistent results. Is it a case of certain teams have a lot of luck compared to us, or is it a case that referee's seem to have their favourites? ------------------------------------ The second thing I wanted to mention is another piece of bad luck; the Pompey game being called off - it adds to fixture pile-up and the fact Norris, their best player, was set to be suspended but will now obviously be able to play against us (and no doubt score against us to add to our luck), as well as them having so many players injured at the moment, it was the perfect time to play them... without Norris, Rocha, Varney and possibly Ward & Pearce, who will all no doubt be fit to play against us in the re-arranged game - sods law and could be the difference between 3 points and 1 or none, which at the end of the season could be the difference for being in the play-offs or out of them for all we know. -------------------------------------- The third is; Has anybody read the February Stan McEwan column? http://kissermag.com/ He talks about our goal-scoring woes at the minute and made a good suggestion - I guess it's something teams used to do, but you don't see it very often anymore... He suggests playing Fryatt in the reserves for a couple of games and letting him bang in a few goals against inexperienced kids, allowing him to get the feel for scoring again, and getting his confidence back, amongst other things.
I definitely agree with you that certain teams gets different decisions. Most refs in this league seem incredibly hesitant to give any major decision such as a red card or penalty when at the KC, yet when you watch the FLS they are throwing red cards around and giving penalties willy-nilly, particularly to West Ham. Also as I've said several times, I don't know why it is but refs are ridiculously harsh on us with yellow cards and the consistency of cards in the exact same game is at times mind-boggling. It seems like every foul a City player commits is a booking, from the most innoccuous looking position in the middle of the pitch, the most average tackle is a yellow card. Yet when we're on a counter-attack and someone is brought down in a key position they go back to being hesitant. Now if I supported a team like Stoke whose primary game plan is bending the rules it wouldn't annoy me so much, but since we're about the most pure footballing team you'll find (even the likes of Southampton wh are considered to play good football will knock it long a lot more than us, and that isn't a criticism of them in any way, it works better than our short strikers do) and yet we're treat like a set of animals. I definitely don't buy the overly simplistic notion that these things just 'balance themselves out' magically. Bollocks do they. Some teams are helped my massive decisions and some are hindered. The ones that I've noticed most are Burnley, West Ham and Leeds. All get way too many penalties.
Am I the only one who thinks the standard of officiating in this division this season has been poor and inconsistent?
It's terrible in this league. Really, reall poor indeed. They hardly ever make a decision themselves, they let whichever players try to control them do just that, or make the simplest, easiest decision possible if they really have to. On MOTD you see some debatable decisions but at least the refs so something and call it as they see it, even if sometimes it is wrong. In this league they know it won't become big news so they just do as little as possible and try to make their own job easy, but it actually has the opposite effect because it gets crowds on their backs.
The linesmen seem to be getting worse too. I remember our last home game against Doncaster the lino in from of the East Stand stood there when the ball had gone out of play - he obviously wasn't paying attention and 5 secs after it had gone out of play, he just stuck his flag up not knowing what to give. As for Fryatt, do you think the old-fashioned technique could work?
I have agreed with PLT on this on numerous occasions. The fact is sometimes we do get the luck of the draw, but that doesn't mean its right, the referee's are still just as awful but just for us. This level their is no consistency at all, and them little decisions that some idiots say don't matter have such a huge say on things, they change the course of the game. Not give one free kick and we could lose the ball, referee's need to have a system of relagation and continued poor performance get them ditched. Problem is we may run out of them!
Yes, I noticed that last week, he was pathetic, waited for the ref to make the decision for him virtually every time before sticking his flag up!
I think the linesman are told to only flag if they know which way to give it and to let the ref decide if they can't quite see. I can sort of sympathise with the lino on that one if he couldn't see; letting the ref decide was probably best. If you think about it, a linesman's job is much harder than a ref's. The ref just has to watch the game and what happens on the ball, but the lino has to constantly watch the defensive line and monitor when an attacker goes beyond it whilst somehow knowing when a ball is struck from the other end of the pitch (he can't possible look in two places at once), give any line calls in his vicinity and also check for nearby fouls. That job is physically impossible to get right all the time but IMO ref's have a much easier task but ovber-complicate it for themselves. Because of that I have a lot of respect for linesman and try not to criticise them too much, but as many on here know, I don't hold back with the refs! What annoys me is that refs who make a mistake in a big televised game will be dropped, even if it was an honest mistake. But at this level it isn't honest mistakes; it's laziness, sometimes bias and often it's completely out of line with the rules of the game but because it isn't brought to the attention of the authorities by the media, they don't even notice. It basically proves that the authorities do very little, if anything, to monitor the performance of referees. I saw a few people on twitter raving about the performance of a ref called Michael Oliver (I think he took the Liverpool - Spurs game last night). I've never heard of the guy but any ref getting such good reviews can only be good news for football.
