Sour Grapes and Gary Lineker

As you will know if you have read these blogs before, one of our pet hates at Refereesjobs.com is Manager’s who moan at referees.

The usual suspects were annoying me again last week: Tony Pulis launched an attack on Lee Probert after Stoke’s cup game with Liverpool. Villas Boas was still at it about Chris Foy in the QPR game a week before, Owen Coyle, after Bolton’s latest defeat at Swansea, tried his level best to deflect attention from his side’s awful start to the campaign by a rebuke of Mark Clattenburg and that before we even get to Steve Bruce, who probably wittered about “consistency.”

But the common denominator in the first three is that all their teams lost the game. And whether it was sour grapes or not, it doesn’t half look like it.

And quite apart from anything else, isn’t it extremely boring to listen to the same old nonsense?

I am sick to the back teeth, frankly of listening to these people drone on and on forever and a day, so in the spirit of “if you aren’t part of the solution you are part of the problem” allow Refereejobs.com to come up with what we think might be a reasonable solution.

Either we stop the post-match interviews or we stop Manager’s talking about referees totally.

If we go down the first route I honestly don’t think it would be a massive loss. What have we ever learnt from the after-match chat? Top Manager’s have pretty much never told us anything they didn’t want to (they call it mind games) and aside from the moaning at the officials who gave the other team everything or them nothing (delete as appropriate) all we ever get are the usual platitudes about how the fans-were-great-the-lads-worked-hard-it’ll-be-a-tough-game-next-week.

And if we go down the second route then perhaps in addition to the aural sleeping pill I mentioned above, maybe, just maybe we could elevate the debate to something about tactics, substitutions, team selection, players performance. I don’t know, but something interesting at least.

But no, what we’ll get is some nonsense on Match of the Day or 5Live, the same old boring rubbish. It’s got to the point where I watch MOTD half an hour behind so I can wind through it, and that way you can miss out what Gary Lineker has to say too.

See - it’s a plan that keeps on giving.