It is odd the apparent historic difference in treatment between, say Kane and Saka.
Might be my own bias, and may be Kane was also more ‘clever’ in terms of his interactions with the referees inside and outside of matches.
But both are key England players, so if you have any preferential treatment in the prem (particularly with discouraging bad and repetitive fouling), it should favour the 2 of them. Kane seemed to get it, whereas Saka seems to be on a blacklist of refs always assuming he’s making the most of challenges.
Maybe also comes with being a pacy, dribbling wide player, goes down more due to his role and gets an (unfair) reputation by nature of his role
It’s exasperating that over the international break they publicly reviewed several incidents and made a point of playing the referees audio. Nothing has been gained from these examples however, as the refereeing teams are clearly not looking at evidence diligently.
It’s too easy for on field refs to pass the buck with these decisions and demonstrate a complacent attitude to refereeing for the sake of saving time.
The main argument people seem to have for not thinking the Romero handball was a penalty is “I don’t like to see them given.” Oh that’s great because the rule book does say “penalties should be given for handball unless Chris Sutton decides he doesn’t like to see it given.”
Also, Spurs fans complaining about how long the review took thinking that means they weren’t sure about the penalty are wrong. A lot of the check was checking different angles to see if Romero had stopped a goal, which would have meant a red card. So Spurs can think themselves lucky and fucking shut up.
I suspect they also looked for a foul by Gabriel, which added to the time.
It’s the penalty for villa and one for Luton as well though. The evidence is so clear those decisions were wrong it’s harder to explain how they were missed!
I’m not going to whine about it but I actually have a hard time understanding how it wasn’t a red for Romero. White’s shot is partially blocked which slows it down a bit but if you watch it in full speed then its still moving plenty fast and if you slow it down then its clearly going into the net based on trajectory. Bissouma is standing closer to the post and would have needed to make an instant superhuman leap to both move 5-6 feet toward the center of the net and head it away.
Leaving the rules aside completely, and just going off my feelings about what is just, I think a penalty and no card was the best combination of decisions in that instance.
