Poor Refereeing & Other Musings

Man U did the impossible and turned the tables on Arsenal by clawing back a 4-2 victory with only 10 men. So Chelsea had to win at Ewood Park to maintain our points difference.

What did I think of the game? If we had one strawberry for every poor referee decision, we would be drinking a lot of smoothies right now. Robben scored our only early goal, but was forced out of the game due to an injury inflicted by Blackburn’s Mokoena and we were not even awarded a free kick. Savage (there’s a reason why he is thus named) committed numerous fouls (including a dangerous swipe from behind on Duff) and received not even a single yellow card. Paul Dickov twice went in late on Petr Cech, and had a boot in Cech’s ribs in the process, got away scot-free. And the referee Uriah Rennie totally made an ass of himself allowing foul after foul to be commited without a booking. I’ve not felt so fucking incensed by a referee’s poor performance since Graham Poll allowed Henry a quick free kick. His standard was appalling for a premiership referee and he had just made it into my black book of "Referees Who Suck" together with Graham Poll and Jeff Winters.

Perhaps Rover’s tactics were to go out and hurt our players since they’ve already conceded an early goal and try to ruffle our feathers. It worked and Chelsea played, in my opinion, one of the most disorganized and unsettling game. I couldn’t believe Joe Cole was substituting Robben where Kezman would have made a bigger impact. We could play 4-4-2 and pressure a Blackburn side which, other than bullish behaviour, had loopholes all over their defence which was not exploited at all. Playing Gudjohnson alone upfront will not see us scoring anymore as the midfield was overrun by players from both sides and delivery into the box was non-existent. Possession was given away cheaply in our own half and since the replacement was made very early in the game I felt we did not need to sit back and protect the lead but instead go for more goals. It was no surprise that the inefficient Cole was later replaced by Jarosik. Other than Cech who superbly saved a penalty and ensured us 3 points, the 2 other players who worked extremely hard and well were Tiago and Lampard. Throughout the game Tiago had suffered numerous tackles for the team. Lampard played rather deep into our own defence to cut out the Rover’s attacks and release long balls to the front. This is one excellent example of what I meant in previous posts about over-reliance on Duff and Robben. Once our delivery from the wingers are cut out, our attack would be stagnant. Without Robben Chelsea was totally lacking of ideas upfront and we were indeed lucky to get all 3 points.


P.S. The above is an edited version to fully comply with my M18 rating. After numerous serious vetting, the following content had been snipped from the original version:

- vulgarities in at least 3 different languages
- mad rantings about opposing team's dirty tactics
- explicit references to Mark Hughe's penis
- 3 racist slurs targetted at the referee
- insults of the maternal kind regarding the female genitalia
- 10 immature and funny names that can be derived from the word "Dickov"

Peace.