But he IS being protected as the players that have fouled him have been booked .OK the Watford guy should have got red but apart from that the bookings have come for the bad fouls .

He undoes his work by then getting himself booked for what are silly fouls which don't even come close to being as aggressive as what he has suffered (leave revenge to someone else ?) . He has to learn to let the referees do their job , he may find he is then in a better frame of mind to do his .

Shearer's remark about its being a "compliment" is the same kind of s***e as "he is entitled to go down". A loose translation might be: "I am a complete arsehole".

As for the FA, they are a disgrace. If someone criticises a referee he generally gets shut down with a fine and punishments designed to prevent the ventilation of very real issues about referees' competence as far as player safety is concerned.

If it were "it was never offside", "should have had a penalty", then that is one thing, but in two consecutive away matches someone has deliberately tried to injure the same player, and received inadequate sanction for it from the referee; the response of the FA is not to investigate and provide the sanction the referee did not, for whatever reason, enforce, but rather to shut down all debate of the matter and pretend it never happened.

The technical term for this attitude is "sticking your head up your arse".

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The Ferret
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Pundits are paid to talk 5hlt, not sense

I disengage, I turn the page.

BBC spend all its time sucking off Citeh so that's not a surprise. I'm surprised that they haven't started calling it the Man City show...

"A man may fight for many things. His country, his friends, his principles, the glistening tear on the cheek of a golden child. But personally, I'd mud-wrestle my own mother for a ton of cash, an amusing clock and a sack of French porn."

I think the Watford one is a straight red the ref bottled because it was 5 minutes in, but the Huddersfield one was a yellow. He was trying to win the tackle, just very badly, or commit a professional foul, desperately, and in a poor starting position he’d never win it or get away with it from. The Watford one was cynical and deserved a suspension.

Wilf needs to cut out the revenge tackles. It is noticed.

Edited by Rudi Hedman (16 Sep 2018 11.30pm)

COYP

Whilst I agree Zaha needs protection from referees, his own credibility suffers a bit with the way he reacts. The foul today was nowhere near as bad as the Watford incident but he went down like he was in terrible agony clutching his leg. Only problem was he wasnt clutching the leg that was fouled. Lets himself down with that sort of thing. I certainly dont agree with the "compliment" comments but you rarely see Messi play acting like that and he gets fouled far more.