That was the Week that Was (Oct 9-14 2023)

Monday Oct 9:

That Paul Merson vs Mike Dean thing was mad. I’ve never heard anybody shout that loudly at another person on TV before but I still think Merse was restrained under the circumstances. Seeing Dean being so smug and condescending and talking down to those ex players like that tells you everything you need to know about how fucked we are now with these officials. I use the term “busy traffic warden bastards” a lot and Dean’s behaviour here is the perfect illustration of it. 

It takes a certain type of mindset to want to be a Premier League referee. I don’t think all of them are knobheads, and many referees lower down the chain are just normal fellas (and women) doing it for the love of the game. But to get to the top it seems like you need to have that same kind of attitude we often see with police, traffic wardens and some of those old school headmaster types. Remember David Elleray? Smug cunt. Now we’ve got loads like him. Where are the Jeff Winters now? He was a knobhead too but he was a completely different type of knobhead. Players could at least have a laugh with him and he wouldn’t go running to mummy if someone swore at him. Someone like him couldn’t make it now though. Not robotic enough, not bald enough and not Manc enough. 

Mark Halsey is another always speaking out about how robotic and shit a lot of these refs are. Players would swear at him and he’d just tell them to fuck off. There isn’t one of these refs who would engage with players like that now, because they adopt this superior attitude where they think that to have authority means you have to talk down to people and not engage in conversation. You can tell an awful lot from how Dean interacted with Merson and those other players on Saturday. He clearly thinks he’s above them, that he’s better than them and that it’s beneath him to be questioned by someone like Merson. He was like that on the pitch and you might argue that he needed to be, but this was a fucking TV studio and he’s still acting like that, which tells me that everything people have said about him for decades is true.

Merson was completely in the right and all Dean could come back with was to continually talk about “the law”. And he did it in that irritating, calm, quiet way where you just know he’s trying to get the other person to lose their shit so he can claim the moral high ground. Watching that, I felt sorry for Merson having to deal with it. He probably wanted to go over and fucking chin him. 

When Dean was asked if ex players should be involved in VAR he scoffed at it and said “they don’t understand the laws of the game, you only have to look at these three here who wanted to stop the game for the sake of it”. That’s what set Merse off. The condescending, sneering superiority of Dean while also saying “for the sake of it” as though they wanted the game stopped because of a throw in or something trivial. “FOR THE SAKE OF IT!!!” Merson was screaming. We were all Paul Merson at that moment.

As angry as Merson was, I was even more angry. These busy little arrogant cunts are ruining football. They’re the Tory Mp’s of our beautiful game, fucking destroying everything they touch. They’ve been given too much power and they’re now using it to influence the results of games. Fans have always accused refs of having it in for their team, but prior to VAR you could just dismiss that off as human error. VAR has removed that excuse. 

We can see them giving decisions that they want to give rather than what is right. It happens every week. Whether you think that’s because there’s financial shenanigans going on or not, the fact that they are manipulating subjective decisions to get the outcome they want is indisputable. The worrying thing now is they’ve started doing it with decisions that are not subjective. 

And when it happens, you have the likes of Dean, Walton and Gallagher defending it, while the ones who aren’t afraid to speak out against it (Halsey for example) just don’t get the same kind of platform to do it. There’s fuck all any of us can do about it either. If I could walk away from it all I probably would at this point, as they’ve killed the sport. The team that wins the league now will be the one who got fucked the least by officials, and usually it’s Man City.

Meanwhile, Naby is injured again. He’s just returned from the injury he picked up in the warm up prior to his first pre-season game, and on his first start for Bremen he tore his thigh muscle. I’m not even going to take the piss as it’s just sad. I’d love to know what happened to this poor bastard. He was hardly injured before he joined us and then it was just muscle injury after muscle injury. He rarely had other types of injuries, just soft tissue ones all the time. How come in this day and age of advanced sports science, they’ve been unable to figure that out? He’s like Lallana and Sturridge. Just unfixable. Matip was like that for a while too but he’s been sound for a couple of years now, so they figured that out. Keita seems like a lost cause though. It gives me no pleasure at all, I wouldn’t have begrudged him going back to the Bundesliga and reigniting his career. Not gonna happen though is it? He’ll be like Sturridge, retired at 32.