He could have made that point without branding the player a liar, a cheat, a diver, and a thug. None of which epithets are remotely justified.

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He wasn’t a particularly good footballer, whoever thought he would make a good pundit?

Yep, it's gone the same way that Top Gear did years ago, hardly anything about the cars and lots about ego boosting the moron presenters.

Unfortunately, Wilf is a victim of both types of targetting by the opposition: repeated fouling and winding up. Wilf's tendency to appear sulky followed by moaning at refs, whilst understandable, rarely affects refs positively. "Star" players like Rooney used to nag refs into submission sometimes, but clubs like ours never seem to have that influence. A.J was similarly accused of diving, even on occasions where still images showed him landing on his face after a collision with defenders. As for the pundits, I like Danny Murphy, who seems to like Palace, but couldn't name a BBC one I respect. It seems the BBC have no obvious or valid criteria for choosing pundits.

The commentary on the NBC link I watched was just as baffling. They decided Wilf had dived in every incident and each time after the replay they had to back track and say that it wasn't a dive. It's bizarre because I don't think there has ever been a case when he has actually dived? There have been the odd occasions when perhaps he could of stayed on his feet, but in each of those he was caught, so it is hard to tell. The media are a bunch of sheep anyway, which is probably because they only really pay attention to the big teams and so will buy into any nonsense thrown at a player in a smaller team

The frustrating thing yesterday was that he repeatedly knocked the ball past a defender only to get unceremoniously pushed or kicked off the pitch. The only way this will ever stop is if other players of ours can carry more of a threat, as this would mean the opposition couldn't take turns to give him rough treatment. Townsend works really hard, but he has lacked confidence in front of goal all season and sometimes he is almost too nice.

I do feel that if Wilf got control of his emotions this would somehow take away from the player he his, the same way Rooney was rubbish when he was calm but when he used to get fired up he could beat a team on his own (now he's just rubbish).

The referee probably could have given out two or three red cards yesterday for double bookings, including one to Ward, but having given out a couple in his last few games I think he was reluctant.

OTOH Frank de Boer was a world-class footballer. As a manager: s***e.

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