It looks very creepy…sidling up to ladies in pools…praps she’s a Manc.
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Oi, not all of us baldies look alike!
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After the fiasco that happened last gameweek for a few clubs, one has to wonder who is supposed to oversee PGMOL as the refereeing standards has sunken to a new low with the PGMOL unable to arrest the slide…
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Glad the always objective Howard Webb is in charge now …
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I’ve been musing over the Club being charged with failing to control their players during the City game. My take on it is that the club should call the referee as a witness and ask him if he’d mislaid his cards?
He’d have to say no. Then point out to him that he could have controlled the players by cautioning them. If anyone “failed to control” the players it was the ref.
I’m sick of saying about refs that they’ve got all the power but are too spineless or useless to use it. 
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And it was against City…
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??? - He is supposed to be refereeing our game on Saturday
So what are the opinions of the ‘handball’ last night?
My thoughts are that the instruction given to the referees from higher up has definitely changed this season. We saw that early on in the season in one of our games where the ball hit a player’s hand (can’t remember if it was one of our players or the opposition. Probably ours), which was in an unnatural position, but they waved it away as it wasn’t a deliberate move of the hand toward the ball. From that point on I have accepted it would be the Suarez/Maradonna type handballs only that would get paid this season, or the odd one paid where a ref completely bottles it.
Thiago falls over and the ball makes contact with his arm. Under this season’s rules its clearly not a penalty. Last season it would 100% have been one. All I can do right now is laugh at Moyes, his arm-flapping players and the 50,000 uneducated WHU fans who clearly aren’t in touch with the rule changes.
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Thought it was a pen (or more of a pen than not) and think he actually handles it twice & we were fortunate to get away with it tbh.
Certainly accidental but that law went out the game years ago, surprised it wasn’t at least referred to by VAR.
Then again you compare it to something similar that happened against West Ham in the game v Chelsea when I think Gallagher strikes the ball and Soucek falls and clearly handles it…not given.
The rule at the moment is:
HANDLING THE BALL
For the purposes of determining handball offences, the upper boundary of the arm is in line with the bottom of the armpit. Not every touch of a player’s hand/arm with the ball is an offence.
It is an offence if a player:
- deliberately touches the ball with their hand/arm, for example moving the hand/arm towards the ball
- touches the ball with their hand/arm when it has made their body unnaturally bigger. A player is considered to have made their body unnaturally bigger when the position of their hand/arm is not a consequence of, or justifiable by, the player’s body movement for that specific situation. By having their hand/arm in such a position, the player takes a risk of their hand/arm being hit by the ball and being penalised
He plays the ball and puts his arm out to break his fall. The ball only hits his arm as a ricochet off Ings. It’s a completely normal position and there was no way that he could have moved it either towards or away from the ball. These are all subjective judgements but you would need a somewhat alternative interpretation of physics to see how this could be seen as anything other than accidental contact.
If West Ham had tried to play on rather than protest for a penalty, they may have got something out of the situation.
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Footage here if you want to look again:
If Ings had been a bit faster…the ball was there for him to kick…but he wasn’t and we kicked it away…
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It was…they looked and said no penalty. I think if they had asked the ref to look at the screen he might well have changed his mind given the double contact but who knows these days.
The big argument for giving it is that the considerations people are giving to excuse it are typically raised when the ball is played into the hand/arm. They tend to carry less weight when it is a situation like last night and the player is putting themselves in the path of the ball.
I had my heart in my mouth thinking that was going to be given on review.
Thanks for the explanation. When I saw it last night I though OMG here we go, look who the ref is but to be honest, I thought it was a Penalty.
I was wrong. 
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It was a ricochet on to his arm as he made the tackle on Ings
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Thiago in last nights game…
Can we get this guy over to Anfield (flight and ticket expense paid) the next time Tierney officiates us? 
In order to improve the refereeing standards in England, PGMOL needs to mic up their referees, record the conversations that happened and release the audio to the public if there is any dispute and not just make some motherhood statement.
The president of the FA needs to step in as the execs in FA and PGMOL simply couldn’t reduce the mounting amount of criticisms against the referees in England. This led to England’s referees appearing at most the quarter-finals of the last World Cup.
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