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A decent enough way to start our home campaign all things considered. Far from perfect and we still have a lot of question marks over our play (and specifically the system), but the encouraging thing was how the team responded to adversity. First, going behind and coming through a wretched opening 20 minutes, and then the way we handled the absolute joke sending off in the second half. This could easily have gone wrong, but it didn’t. So I’ll take the positives and the points and we move on to next week. That’s going to be much tougher though. Tougher even than Chelsea last week. And if we don’t get that ban overturned it will be tougher still. I’m going to start with that because it really was such a disgusting situation. The problem is twofold though. I’ll start with the initial decision first. I genuinely don’t see how the referee can be sure that was such a bad tackle that it’s worthy of a red. He couldn’t possibly know for sure because it happened so quickly. What he did know is that Mac Allister didn’t go in with studs raised high. He also knows that he didn’t leave his feet, or lunge wildly. So he was in control of his body and wasn’t throwing himself recklessly. So the worst that could have happened was that he was a fraction late and caught the lad on the shin, possibly with the sole of his boot. It’s possibly that it might be a red, but highly unlikely. So why was his first instinct to produce the red card? That’s just bad refereeing, but we have a safeguard in place for that now to prevent those mistakes from wrongly hurting teams. Don’t we? Ha! As if. The first problem is a referee who, if he is unsure (which he had to have been because how can you be sure when the tackles doesn’t fit most of the criteria for a red card?), should be issuing a yellow card and then letting VAR help him out if he has indeed missed something really bad. A referee should only be handing out a straight red if he’s certain, otherwise he should always err on the side of caution just for the good of the game. Klopp said afterwards that if a yellow had been awarded, VAR wouldn’t have overturned it. He’s probably right, but it’s Paul Tierney and his Toblerone shaped mate, so you can’t be so sure. Nevertheless, Klopp’s overall point is correct. There’s no way anybody looks at a replay of that and says “no that’s a red card”. So why didn’t they step in and tell the ref he was wrong? Well the answer to that is simple. We’ll hear a lot of bureaucratic nonsense about “high thresholds for overturning decisions” and “clear and obvious” but it’s really just about who is making the call. Paul Tierney is out to fuck Jurgen Klopp every chances he gets. He always has been, but it’s gone into overdrive since Klopp waged a public war with him. He was never going to overturn that. He was probably laughing his tiny cock off along with Captain Roid Rage beside him. So we got fucked again by Tierney and Webb (who put Tierney in position to do it, just because he can). The question now is what do we do about it? Klopp has wisely refrained from attacking the officials who made the decisions and has concentrated solely on the decision itself and why it was wrong. You have to do that and you also have to appeal. You can’t not appeal a decision as bad as that because you’re basically making yourself a punchbag for the refs. You have to stand up to it. So lodge the appeal and made sure as many pundits as possible call it out for fucking travesty it was. We shouldn’t need to do too much as I expect any ex pro who is commenting on it will say what a joke it was and that it needs to be rescinded. As far as I’m away it isn’t the refs who hear the appeal so we should be ok there. We’ll see though. But enough of that and onto the game itself.