Dr Keene Frog Basher |
DISGRACEFUL BEHAVIOUR
The rubbish behaviour from players is the topic of the moment. And it starts off from managers like Arsene Wenger, Alex Ferguson and Rafa Benitez telling their players in training to stalk the referee as much as they can.
Then you’ve got Neil Warnock and Sam Allardyce (thank God he’s currently out of the game) who also claim to have the skills of a referee. Yet none of these managers will ever offer to go and referee a game.
You get their post match comments saying how incompetent the referee was. How would they like it if the referee gave a rant after the game criticising managers’ tactics, saying the substitution was badly timed, the manager should have put on a defender instead of an attacker, or a 3-5-2 formation should have been used instead of a 4-4-2. I’m quite sure the manager would tell the referee to stop telling him how to do his job.
It’s from this that the lack of respect from the players starts on the pitch. Mascherano was rightly sent off yesterday, and I thought referee Steve Bennett couldn’t have handled the situation better. After being told to fuck off about four times from Mascherano, which the viewers could all see him saying, he finally had enough when Mascherano decided to intervene on Torres’s yellow card, and once more tell the referee to fuck off.
Andy Gray, the idiot in the Sky studio, sets a bad example and is also one of the reasons referees are so badly treated. He went into a rant yesterday, interrupting Jamie Redknapp from trying to make his point that Mascherano is playing with fire by constantly hassling the referee. Andy Gray says Mascherano is just being a little enthusiastic, and what’s wrong with going to talk to the referee. He fails to mention his constant hassling of the referee throughout the first half. He then blames the referee for Mascherano subsequently losing his temper and refusing to go off the pitch.
Andy Gray sets an appalling example in football. He encourages referee hounding. Again, look at how referees are respected in rugby. Someone gets sin binned and the player goes straight off, you don’t get the whole team coming to surround the referee.
Referees also aren’t paid £10,000 to £30,000 a week like players and managers that berate them are. They’re paid something like £1,000 a match, and also have a day job.
So my message to Arsene Wenger, Alex Ferguson, Rafa Benitez, Neil Warnock and Sam Allardyce is you’re the reason referees are so disrespected, because you have devoted training sessions on how to make the referee’s job as difficult as possible. And as for you Andy Gray: you set a hideous example.
Over to Villa, and all I have to say now is thank God we’re on 49 points, because I don’t think we’ll be getting many more. Our season seemed to finish after the Arsenal game. Clearly our squad is too small, we knew that last summer, but left it till really late to bring some players in. Probably because at the time there wasn’t really anyone out there to buy. It’s very easy to say “Buy ten new players”, especially now as we have the resources. But who do you buy? Ten unknowns from Eastern Europe and Scandinavia?
We’ll be in the same position this summer. We’ll need to increase our squad size. But who are we going to buy? I don’t want to become a Manchester City who overnight transformed their squad to loads of foreigners, we at least had some dignity last summer and brought in six English players, and just one foreigner, who was Salifou, who hasn’t yet played. There’s also Euro 2008, and every player in that competition will be up for sale.
So seven games left. One good thing to come out of the Sunderland result is that it didn’t help Small Heath out. On Saturday Small Heath fans were Villa fans, like when we were Small Heath fans four years ago, needing them to beat Liverpool so we could get a Champions League spot, and they deliberately lost. So lets deliberately lose to teams around them. And of course, when we play Small Heath, which is quite soon, lets put up a good display!
So the next thing I’m looking forward to is the players we’re going to buy over the summer, assuming there’s anyone buyable. Until then, nothing more to play for. We’ve applied for the Intertoto, and I assume no one else has, meaning we’re definitely in it. I don’t mind this, every now and then the Intertoto is fine, just not every season. Under Doug we only played in it so that there’d be a bit more money for him, but now this time it’s not about money, it’s about more meaningful preseason matches than Walsall and Kidderminster. We could get a team from Kazakhstan in our July match.
That’s it for now. Can’t say I know who we have next, don’t really care. Wait, is it United? Then I really don’t care, that fixture’s always a foregone conclusion.
Last update: Monday, March 24, 2008 at 12:07:05 PM |
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