How do I feel tonight ? I answered that on an earlier thread which, unfortunately, was being infested with Mag wums. What I wrote has more its place on this thread perhaps so forgive me if I just copy-paste my remarks.
"To come back from 4-0 down, come on, it's a hell of a performance. OK, you can talk about refs bottling it and Arsenal hitting the self-destroy button and all but even so, how many teams do that? No, credit where credit's due.
However, which team would you rather be supporting when you look at the long term? There we were, playing the football at Stoke with two excellent new players,(and 5 or 6 injuries) and we get mugged in the last ten minutes, whereas Newcastle lose their talisman player in the transfer window, go down to 4-0 but then profit from an incredibly freakish day of football. If the two teams play the way they did today "under normal circumstances", I know which team's supporters will be wearing the bigger smiles most Monday mornings before the end of the season.
I'm really looking forward to the rest of the season, though I do hope Newcastle stay up."
"Just to add to the point I was making, who were the teams that got out of jail today? Newcastle and Stoke. Who were the teams that took a stumble? Manchester United, Arsenal and Sunderland. I know which group I would want to belong to.
I wouldn't put Wolves today in the "got out of jail" league. I thought they werre terrific for 90 minutes. Loved the full back's reaction to scoring his first goal since playing for Colchester United. Hope they show it all on MOTD.
Didn't think that at 3.30 (my time) I would want to watch MOTD tonight but you have to, haven't you? - especially that I've now got a better perspective on things.
With my apologies for getting off the theme of this thread, I would like to support what Danny says about technology (and I trust my comments in the earlier thread will save me from any criticisms concerning sour grapes etc.). In my opinion, every referee should have the right to consult his fourth official, who is watching an immediate replay of the action, whenever a goal is scored or disallowed. It takes 10 seconds for an action replay to be shown to the tv audience, sometimes a whole minute for the referee to fight off protests from angry players and get the game underway again. We would be saving time and enforcing justice. I cannot see the argument against it. Goals are so important. Those two today could cost us a European place next year.
You might argue that Saha scored an offside goal in midweek and had one wrongly chalked off today and that neither affected the final result. But Arsenal should have won 2-0 in midweek and Everton 6-3 today. It makes no difference for Everton. They finish the week with 3 points and a 6-5goal difference but Arsenal have one goal more against them and Blackpool one less, which might make a difference. But we lost THREE POINTS today! How long will it take for us to make that up with dodgy decisions going our way? Who knows? Maybe we'll react badly to this and go on a bad run whereas if we'd won, we'd be on a high and ready for the hard fixtures coming up. Confidence is everything in sport.
No, for me, to be clear and to remove as much of the chanciness of human error from the game, technology must be used. Human error will always be there in the players - thank God - you can't (and don't want to) get rid of it, but when it is possible to reduce the level of chance in order to raise the level of JUSTICE, you have to do it. I feel sure that the referees themselves would be in favour of it as it would take one hell of a burden off their shoulders.
To get back to the subject of this thread, I am none the less looking forward to the rest of the season (and especially the next 5 matches) as I think we have a really great team in the making.