Bleating Bleating and More Bleating

Another week, another manager blames a referee for his team losing.

This week’s culprit was Kenny Dalglish.

The Liverpool boss was in a tizzy last Saturday night after his team lost at Stoke. It was all Mark Clattenburg’s fault apparently – nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that his team gave a whole new meaning to the word “profligacy” as they wasted chance of after chance.

No matter, faced with this Dalglish said after the game: "We would like to be respectful to referees - and I'd like to think I have been - but more importantly than being respectful to the referees is having respect for my football club," he said.

"If I feel they are suffering in any shape or form I will need to go the same route other people go and see if we can gain some benefit from that.

"The first four league games have had contentious decisions in them and every one has gone against us.”

Now, that’s his choice, of course. And I assume we can take from his pronouncements that he plans to be vocal in his criticism of the officials. It won’t be long, I am sure, before his wittering on about “respect being a two way street etc etc.”
I
t is surely one of the most unedifying things in football. Manager-loses-game-must-be-referees-fault.  And they are all at it too. Lets not forget that “King Kenny’s” opposite number in the dugout last week, Mr. Pulis is hardly a shrinking violet when it comes to the “the referee cost us” type Press Conferences.

But there is one point that, in all the bluster, seems to have been forgotten. The referee actually, probably, got them all right. Stoke’s penalty, although soft, could have been a foul, the second handball, the one that saw Luis Suarez booked for dissent, was never a penalty – and the Rory Delap one (although definitely the most obvious penalty), could be seen as accidental and tellingly the Liverpool players closest to the incident don’t seem overly fussed at the time.

No one is saying that Refs don’t get anything wrong. I am not even saying that managers shouldn’t question officials if they so choose (albeit there must be boundaries, surely?) but really this constant bleating is boring everyone, and doing no one any good.