Six years ago today we were going great guns away to Roma in the Europa qualifiers. One nil up at half time thanks to a Diomansy Kamara penalty. Then Dutch referee, Kevin Blom, blew things asunder. Eric Nevland came on for Kamara at the start of the second and was sent off 4 minutes later, for a totally innocuous foul. please log in to view this image To the consternation of the travelling 1500, the Roma players continually badgered the hapless referee, who compounded his earlier bias by sending of a second Fulham player, Paul Konchesky, late on. After the match a livid Roy Hodgson stopped short of revealing his true feelings and said: “You can’t expect me to be happy in the face of injustice. I thought both red cards were harsh but what does it matter what I think? We were clearly the better team, the controlling team in the first half, and to have to play with 10 men for the whole of the second half, like we did at Craven Cottage, was hard.” Roma nicked two goals, from deflections, and Ranieri’s team went on to win 2-1. But … after all that, we set a fire under the Europa and made our own bit of history. The team that night was: Schwarzer; Pantsil, Hughes, Hangeland, Konchesky; Gera, Etuhu (Baird 76'), Greening, Bjorn Helge Riise (Zamora 69'); Dempsey, Kamara (Nevland 46')
Blimey, he's still around. Just watched the Europa highlights from ITV and there he was in the Liverpool game against the Russian side. In the clip he never moved from the centre of the field and had a quiet night only giving one yellow. Which is more than can be said for him in the Wales v Andorra match last month when he dished out a whopping 10 yellows. How do these guys get away with being incompetent one minute and inept the next. Maybe Jose should get the sympathy vote!?
