***TOTTENHAM HOTSPUR vs Leeds OMT***

[SissokoWasGood (BoL)]

Pretty comfortable with it not being a red as a single incident. He was clearly looking to the right and it was unfortunate that his left foot stood on the back of Tel's. But...this isn't a single incident. The bar has been set, including by this ref for the Xavi red. That he wasn't asked to look at it on the monitor is dumbfounding.

Other than that, a pretty terrible performance. Never looked like scoring and just lacked a lot of energy.

Agreed. I’d rather we just have more common sense overall because I think all of Bentancur, Mateta, Xavi last season, a lot of these don’t need to be reds. Minimal contact, or accidental because the opposing player just moved too quickly at the last second. If we left reds for obviously intentional or obviously reckless, I’d be perfectly fine with it.

But as you say, that just isn’t the bar, And I can’t for the life of my understand why they can’t understand that when a bar is set on a particular decision, that becomes the standard they should ref it on, at least in that season. If they then want to look at the threshold over the summer, fine. There is just insufficient weight to precedent set throughout a season and I think an overweighting to what the ‘rules’ say. That may sound silly when talking about a ref, because it’s their job to enforce them. But I think the rules are interpreted beyond their logical function and we just get so many frankly dumb incidents of inconsistency. Bentancur was not ‘being violent’ any more than Palmer or Shaw were, and yet he gets sent off because there’s something written down about head butting. You can apparently stamp on someone’s ankle and force them to be subbed if you are going slower, and you can be carded if you win the ball and completely slow your momentum (Porro). The whole thing is so stupid.

 

[Bishop]

So then you don’t let Lankshear go or you ensure Richarlison is in the squad. Complete mismanagement of resources.

Richarlison is not the answer and the lack of a competent striker was not the problem today. Finishing was not the issue, supply ie. the lack of creativity was. Unless we are talking an absolute world class player, there is no striker who gets a goal today when the team structure was incapable of actually creating for one. Yes striker is a problem but you're misdiagnosing today's problem.

 

[90291Spur]

Unsurprisingly MOTD side with the ref. The simple thing to ask Proref is to ask what the difference was with the Xavi one. They’ve found some funky wording to defend today’s decision which they didn’t find for Xavi. As I said above - all b0ll0x.

I’m waiting for the ‘he’s not that kind of player’ argument to be trotted out.