Chelsea 2-3 United

Not the way most United fans would have wanted to win it, but three points at the Bridge after 10 years of waiting is gratifying. In some respects, there was a ring of a karmic bell being pealed as Chelsea have benefited from some partisan officiating in the past 4 years of this fixture; an observation made by many impartial pundits.

United came flying out of the blocks and were two goals up in under 15 minutes. Chelsea looked shellshocked and didn’t wake up until 10 minutes before half time. Juan Mata punished a stupid Rooney challenge with a phenomenal free-kick goal and after half time, Ramires outjumped the otherwise solid Tom Cleverley to equalize for the Blues. United were hemmed back in their half for most of the second period until Branislav Ivanovic was sent off for a clumsy foul on Ashley Young. As the last defender, with Young in a very good scoring situation (which he likely would have choked on, but that’s not the point!), the ref had a very easy decision to make and sent the right back off. That’s where the game changed, and not for the better. Five minutes after Ivanovic got his marching orders, Torres was sent off for what is sure to be a powder-keg issue over the coming weeks.

One-on-one with Jonny Evans, Torres was caught by the United defender and went down like a sack of potatoes. Even the most die-hard United fan, like myself, was worried about whether the ref would overreact and send Evans off. My initial thought as Clattenburg walked over was that Evans was getting a yellow. Rio Ferdinand was also in attendance and Torres wasn’t clean through on goal so I didn’t think Evans’ foul warranted a red. That Clattenburg then gave Torres a second yellow and subsequent red was simply amazing. I will admit to chuckling quite a lot and not giving a massive shit. Torres should have already been sent off for a disgraceful attempt to decapitate Tom Cleverely in the first half so was lucky to still be on the field, but in this instance, he was definitely not due a card. There was absolute clear contact between Evans and Torres and I’ve yet to see a forward who wouldn’t have gone down with even that minimal contact, in that area of the pitch. 99.9% of the time it would also have been given as a foul.

Things got worse for Chelsea and a whole lot worse for the ref when Javier Hernandez scored the winning goal from a clearly (on seeing the replays) offside position. In the defence of the officials here though it must be said that anyone who has played the game, or refereed would agree that it was a tough call to get right. There was so much going on in the box and so many bodies obstructing the linesman’s view of the incident that it would have been a miracle if they had got it right! Still, it underscores the now frustratingly recurring argument that referees need more help to make sure they’re getting the big calls right in these big games.

So I think everyone agrees that Torres was lucky to have still been on the pitch to get the second yellow, but everyone also agrees that that yellow was harsh, to put it mildly. However, there was a very, very interesting perspective raised by Sir Alex Ferguson after the game. To put this in context and to be clear, he was only trying to find an excuse for the sending off, protecting Jonny Evans and basically giving the party line, but there was a large chunk of truth and food for debate in what he said. Basically, he pointed out that regardless of whether there was contact (and it really was minimal, let’s be honest), Torres’ INTENT was to go down. Now, I’m not saying that he’s right in this particular case because I’ve never heard of any mandate for the officials to book players for diving even if there is contact. But this is a very interesting point that he brings up.

Players can be booked or even sent off even if they make no contact with a player, simply because they INTENDED to injure or foul the player. If you go in knee-high, studs up and fortunately don’t catch your intended victim, I absolutely agree that you should be booked. So if we’re going to apply that principle to one aspect of the game, I can see a valid argument to apply it to all aspects of the game. If your intent is to flop and flail around and make it look like you’ve been shot, then perhaps we should start saying that that is a bookable offence. If that were the case then I think it could be argued that Evans should have been booked, Chelsea should have had a free kick, but Torres should be booked for “embellishment”.

Having played long enough, I know the problem with this idea is that in lots of cases, if you don’t go down, the referee won’t call the foul. Either because they don’t see it, or they’ve been conditioned to react to the reaction of the players. In either case, it’s not an ideal system.

So how do we fix the issue without changing the game too much? Most games still pass without major incident.  Most refs don’t make major gaffs like this and even in cases where mistakes are made, it’s fairly infrequent that it really affects the result (no matter what the managers may tell you afterwards). I’m not in favour of stopping the game every five minutes to check with a video ref. It slows the game down too much and you can run into a situation similar to that in Rugby League where the refs never want to make a call, but will instead “go upstairs” to let someone else make the tough decision. I do think though that you could have something similar to the NFL, where managers are given a set number of challenges that they can use to have huge plays reviewed. In this case, the Torres challenge on Cleverley, the Torres sending off and the Hernandez goal could all potentially have been non-issues. The other obvious issue is that of goal-line technology. It would have played no part in today’s game but why is its adoption taking so long? It’s such a simple measure to put in place that would help the referees make more good decisions.

The underlying issue though, aside from technology, rule changes, bad reffing etc. is plain old sporting honesty. There is so much money in the game now that players are willing to do almost anything to win. It may be idealistic and unreasonable to expect that we can go back to the days where players just got up and got on with it instead of rolling around like gunshot victims, but I think that there could be more being done to instill a sense of honesty and respect with regards to how players react in these situations.

Now, having said all that; three massive points for United in a game I really felt they couldn’t afford to lose. Arsenal next week in another huge game could shape the rest of United’s season. I still suspect that Chelsea may win the league as I still think that they’re the strongest team at the moment, but the Premier League always provides so many twists and turns and United rarely hit their absolute best form until Christmas, so it will be interesting to see where we are come May. Hopefully, there aren’t too many more games decided by terrible calls, but I’ll take this one. It’s not like we haven’t been on the wrong end of it against Chelski for the last four years!