UP TO 9TH BUT I'M STILL ANGRY!

UP TO 9^TH BUT I’M STILL ANGRY

Norwich City are 9^th in the Premier League. In the last three days they have enjoyed a brilliant 2-2 home draw with Everton and an even better 2-1 away win at White Hart Lane. The country seems, at last, to be taking notice of Paul Lambert’s amazing Norfolk revolution and giving credit where it’s due.

But tonight I am actually an angry Norwich City fan. And I suspect that my ire is something shared by supporters of several other Premier league clubs, and, at this moment, those of Wigan Athletic in particular.

The fact is I have just about had enough of the weak, feckless and frankly dishonest refereeing that we witness in English football’s top division every matchday. I really have had enough. When is somebody or some organisation actually going to have the courage to do something about it? Last Saturday evening on various radio phone-ins the subject was at least addressed but I fear that it will soon be forgotten amidst the euphoria surrounding Sir Alex Chewing-Gum’s latest title triumph.

What we see every week is an outrageous insult to the players, management and supporters of the so-called ‘lesser clubs’. I am not sure how or when a club enters the elite club which is blatantly favoured by referees but there must be some secret method of entry.

What I do know is that Norwich City aren’t in that club, and nor are Wigan Athletic.

Last Saturday the gutless Andre Marriner followed up his appalling performance in the February game at Carrow Road against Manchester United with an even more embarrassing display in Norwich’s game with Everton. The visitors’ left-back, Leighton Baines, was booked after about 25 minutes for a trip on Elliott Bennett. Fair enough. No complaints from either side. Just before half-time a reckless high challenge on City’s David Fox should certainly have spelled the end of the game for Baines and seen Norwich playing against ten men for the entire second half. However, Andre Marriner, to use the common parlance, ‘bottled it’. Or perhaps I should say he demonstrated to one and all that David Moyes has been granted access to that elite club of managers who must not be upset. Even so when the reprieved Baines blatantly blocked Russell Martin in the game’s dying minutes Moyes himself must have been fearing the worst. But no, again the spineless Marriner refused to apply the law, preferring to keep ‘in’ with the highly-respected Moyes.

Add to this blatantly sycophantic decision-making Marriner’s ludicrous failure to penalise Steven Pienaar for obstruction when he virtually sat on the ball in the build-up to Everton’s second goal and you need no further evidence to rule that here is a very poor referee indeed.

We deserve better officiating than this in the Premier League and  Wigan Athletic, too, deserve better than they got at Stamford Bridge last Saturday when a brave away performance which arguably might just have kept them up (and earned them the estimated £90m which goes with that) was totally undermined by utter incompetence from the referee and, in particular, his assistant. Both the home side’s goals in a 2-1 win were so far offside that even a Sunday League linesman with a raging hangover could  have seen it! Proof positive that Wigan’s Roberto Martinez has yet to become a member of ‘the club’.

And so to White Hart Lane today. Let’s not allow the euphoria surrounding what was arguably  Norwich City’s finest league win for years to obscure the fact that Michael Oliver, supposedly one of our finest up and coming officials, is another who lacks the courage needed to perform properly at the highest level. City were denied two, if not three, excellent penalty appeals. But it is the first of these, when Ledley King’s blatant wrestling to the floor of Grant Holt was waved away, that most damns Oliver. His refusal to apply the laws of the game fairly and without bias shows without question that Harry Redknapp enjoys the favour of the game’s officials so clearly not shared by Martinez and Paul Lambert.

I don’t know the intricacies of the referee assessment system. I do know, however, that the time has come for something to be done. Somebody somewhere must act now to bring an end to this farce!