Good post. I was mostly on the "incompetence, not bias/conspiracy" side for a long time, but the brazen gaslighting and alternative fact-telling after the drop ball and the Doku incident have convinced me there is more to it than myopia or bottling of big occasions. And I wasn't even particularly bothered by the Doku incident in the immediate aftermath- I thought it was a penalty but "you've seen them not given" - but reading the transcript of Oliver's interaction with the VAR/AVAR, the continued parroting by the media and PGMOL boss of the demonstrable lie of Doku winning the ball, the Ministry of Truth-level description of the event by Atwell (unless things have changed since I was a ref and a "high chest" is now a thing), Oliver going from being the country's best ref to one of its worst while travelling to the UAE on massive moonlighting deals that PGMOL have adjudged to be fine and dandy, all tells me there is more likely than not to be fire behind the smoke.
Got to say I didn't see it at the game and didn't know about it until I watched it on the telly when I got home. It was of course 100% a clear pen but then listening to the studio pundits afterwards especially Carragher I do have to admit I did start to have fleeting doubts about my own interpretation, even thinking that just maybe with all the recent rule changes that for some strange reason such dangerous kicking was no longer considered foul play. So I phoned my son in law (a Blue) to check with him and it took no more than a moment for me to re-enter the real world and realise that Carragher and the others had been spouting complete fucking bollocks as of course such dangerous kicking was a clear foul.
The subsequent Howard Webb attempt to present a 50-50 interpretation was of course so preposterous it was nigh impossible to believe even a lying low life such as him could have gone through with it.
And as you rightly say, the desperation of his attempt to defend such an officialdom abomination - as so brilliantly illustrated by Man united fanatic Mark Goldbridge in his You Tube piece - must surely convince even those Reds hitherto so sceptical of what they consider merely tin foil hat conspiracies concerning our club to re-examine their scepticism when reflecting on the absurdities and lies of this particular judgement in tandem with the other two crucial injustices highlighted in my earlier post.
As I stressed above, none of us can know what lies behind these three utter travesties. All we do know is that for whatever reason the officials both on field and in the VAR studio chose not to favour Liverpool with decisions that any fair and impartial officials would most certainly have done. Whether that is down to unconscious bias or something more sinister we do not know.
What it cannot possibly be when reflecting on the circumstances surrounding all three episodes is mere incompetence and ineptitude of officials of such high station in the refereeing pyramid, as some within both the threads dealing with these matters on this forum seem to have so doggedly maintained. As I see it, surely no Liverpudlian worthy of the name can surely still believe such an explanation now that the weasel lying of Webb regarding the latest episode has so vividly exposed the shams we've all had to witness and endure.
