Frank Dacey

Dean is reffing one of the FA cup ties this weekend, so he's obviously not being punished. Not only have 2 red cards of his been rescinded but he was also VAR when Southampton were denied a stonewall penalty at home to Villa. One of the other things VAR is doing is increasing the workload on refs. Friend was 4th official in the tea time game on Saturday at Fulham and then reffed the Sunday evening game at Bramall Lane. What chance does that give hime to rest, recover and prepare? Of course, you could well argue that a rested, recovered and prepared Kevin Friend would still be awful.

Whatever we might think about Mike Dean, he is a highly experienced referee and one who is generally thought to know his own mind, a bit too well, some might say. Yet last night he looked almost apologetic when he sent Soucek off and gave me the impression that he felt he had no alternative. This suggests that his bosses frown on refs who don't ref in a certain way, but at the same time tolerate gross incompetents like Mason, Friend etc. Once again, we come back to the problem being at the top with the man who was in charge. Until Riley goes, nothing will get better.

With Kevin Friend as 4th official!

A lot of these new interpretations are the work of IFAB and bear the fingerprints of David Elleray, a man who always appeared to be sure of his decision-making, despite a considerable body of evidence that suggested otherwise. The changes he's been behind have made things worse rather than better and made the refs job more difficult.

I think Dean was the VAR who shafted Southampton in the Villa game and then the onfield ref who did for them at Old Trafford. It's surely unusual for one ref to be involved in officiating consecutive games for the same team?

You did have a good season, and congratulations on that, but the next highest scorer was the Saint with 11. The previous season he scored 22 and Alf Arrowsmith got 19, but he got a serious injury in the Charity Shield and hardly contributed so that's a hell of a lot of goals to take out of a team.

I suppose if there's a silver lining its that by losing to Burnley and Brighton we've made it much more difficult for big fat Spam to maintain his record of never being relegated from the top flight. If he takes West Brom fown that might be the end of him which would be a (very small) crumb of comfort. A couple of posts have delved back into troubled times in the past. I'd draw people's attention to the 64-65 season when a team that had been highly successful for three seasons (getting promoted, establishing themselves in the top flight and then winning the league in only our second season up) and played with very few injuries suddenly were afflicted by a terrible run of injuries. No player appeared in every league game and well over 20 players made senior appearances. We finished 7th in the league ....but we won the cup and the following season won the league again as the injuries disappeared. Let's hope we can limp into a top 4 spot, do well in the CL and bounce back next season in the league.

By no means were all the bombs dropped aerodynamic, which might have enabled them to be 'aimed' more accurately. They dropped parachute mines, which were largely metal cans packed with explosives. Of course parachutes would be vulnerable to any winds and so could easily be blown off course. They dropped one on Orrell Park, where I grew up, and destroyed a pub, some houses and shops and damaged a couple of shops. I daresay they'd hoped to hit the docks. The Coventry raid was notorious for the Germans using an early direction finding device which enabled them to pinpoint a target well inland and do an enormous amount of damage, but once the British worked out what they were doing they could jam the signal.

They had aerial reconaissance photos which were quite clear, but at night, at 10,000+ feet it's incredibly difficult to be accurate. The RAF conducted a survey of their raids in 1942 and discovered that something like 5% of the bombs they dropped fell within a couple of miles of the target. One of the first things Harris did when he took over Bomber Command was to target ports, because they were so much easier to find. Even then, the idea was to bomb areas, if you couldn't hit the vital installations you could disrupt services and dehouse workers. The Americans believed that by bombing in daylight they could hit targets precisely, but it's not clear that they were successful.

I think the first British raids on Berlin were carried out by twin engined bombers; England to Berlin is a longer distance than from France to Liverpool, I guess. The Germans might claim to have been aiming for Leyland Motors but they had little chance of finding it. The easiest targets to find early in the war were waterside towns and cities. Water is one thing you can see at 10,000 feet on a pitch black night.

Christopher Browning wrote a book called, 'Ordinary Men', which looked at a reserve police battalion that was used in the extermination policy on the Eastern front. Well worth a read, as well as Primo Levi's account of his time in Auschwitz, 'Is this a man?'

My uncle, who I always thought was a sound fella, hated Sammy Lee with a passion. He reckoned the only reason why he was getting a game was that his old man was a butcher and supplying Paisley with prime cuts. I think you're being a bit harsh on Maupay, I watched him a lot at Brentford and had a lot of time for him. Early in his time there he was struggling to settle and missed an absolute sitter at Cardiff, so bad that it went viral. It could have ruined his confidence, but he kept his head down, started to score a few goals and never looked back. The other thing was that pretty much every week he was up against two big grocks and never took a backward step. He reminded me inhis attitude of Suarez in that respect, not as good obviously, but you loved him as your player while opposition fans hated him.

I just looked at the match stats and we had 66% of possession but of the 21 fouls in the game, 15 were given against us. I'm struggling to see how that is possible.

Glad to see you gunning for Mike Riley. He was a terrible referee and I was amazed that he got the top job. Ever since, the standard of refereeing has declined badly, to the extent there was no English referee at the last World Cup, for the first time in my memory. Riley also fucked us over at Old Trafford when he gave two pens against us there, even Roy Keane looked embarassed at how soft they were. I also recall Moyes, when he was at Everton, protesting about Riley being given an FA cup semi-final they had against United, on the grounds he was notorious for favouring them. Proof that even Moyes can be right about something.

They beat us in the '71 cup final, still one of my worst moments in watching football. Then the George Graham years of utterly mechanical football, culminating in robbing us of the title in 1989, also one of my worst moments. They were a good watch under Wenger when he was in his prime. Their problem was that they didn't deal with Wenger's future when it became an issue. Every Arsenal game for about 4 seasons was viewed through the prism of whether Wenger should stay or go. The result was that the players effectively got a pass; they could be awful but the focus would be on the manager and Arsenal are suffering for that now. The players aren't up to much but it's Arteta in the firing line. Any manager going in there, other than someone from the top tier is going to have their work cut out.

I was quite confident about this with them having no crowd in and Benteke being suspended just as he'd finally located the net after about five years, then I saw that Fat Jon Moss was the ref ad that got me worried again as any game with him in charge is a lottery. It shows how well we performed that probably for the first time this season a match report didn't mention either the ref or VAR.

David Coote began the long road to redemption by sending off Benteke.

Alan Evans got 3 in his first 2 games and then struggled. Frustratingly, he had flashes of brilliance but was never consistent. Got replaced by Keegan, a bit like replacing a damp quib with high explosive. I seem to recall Aspas having a good pre-season....

We're going for the unbeaten at home record on Sunday. The team that ended the last unbeaten run was Leicester...Reds fans of my age can remember Leicester as always being a tough nut to crack. Football has failed to respond to the pandemic seriously. UEFA should have scrapped the Nations League (it's hardly a long established competition) and, I would argue, they should have scrapped the Euros next summer. Domestically we should have abandoned the League Cup for this season. Instead, the authorities have tried to squeeze everything in, with obvious consequences for player's fitness. Ray Clemence was a great goalkeeper in an era of great keepers. Even omitting Shilton, there were Gordon Banks and Pat Jennings about, two of the best ever and Ray sttod out in their company.

Alan Ball made his debut (for Blackpool) against us in our first game back in the top flight. They won (at Anfield) so that distinguishes him from the vast majority of Everton players. He was a very good player, so much so that Shankly had Ian Ross man mark him in a couple of derbies. The only other player who got the same attention was Beckenbauer, so not bad company.

Harsh on Mike Dean, who doesn't deserve to be on that list of baldy no-marks. Is Anthony Taylor lined up to ref us at the week-end? Try watching the Watford v Stoke highlights on YouTube and have a look at the Watford equaliser; a truly awful decision and proof that keepers aren't always protected

My grandad reckoned Jimmy Melia lost his place in the team in 1964 because he was Catholic, but Smith, Callaghan and Lawler from that team were Catholic boys. In all my time at Anfield I can't ever remember any sectarianism from the crowd, even in the early 60s when sectarianism was still rife in the city. My brother did get thumped in the Boy's Pen for wearing his (Catholic) school scarf but only because the colours, purple and grey, were mistaken for Burnley's colours, who were beating us that day.

Great report! My concern about VAR was always that the people who operated it were the same incompetents who'd made its introduction necessary. Obviously, Coote is the villain this week, but the root of the problems lie at the top, in Mike Riley who chooses these refs and keeps them on the list despite the mounting evidence of their uselessness. David Elleray is also culpable because he's at IFAB and seems determined to mess around with the laws with the effect of making them more complex and uch harder to enforce.

Apparently it is with the E Street band; 9 new songs and three reworked oldies. There's lots more about it on the Backstreets site.