(From the support the team thread.. - probably belongs in here rather than there..)
I haven't heard one person on here claim conspiracy.
Mike Riley has always favoured Manchester United. He used to be known as 'Manc' Riley.
Since then we've had a referee admit that referees favoured Manchester United
Since then we've got several referees that come from familes where their entire family are Manchester United Season ticket holders - and they are the only ones that 'support' Altrincham or Bury or some other random small team.
There is no 'grand conspiracy' - there is just bias.
You see it in every game, and yes, I'm just as biased. I will see a foul that others would see nothing and vice-versa.
However, in most games this season you can see a decision that is made which directly contradicts decisions made in other games. It would be worth investigating for instance a few specific examples and then look at why the officials and VAR and the media 'missed them'
Let's start with five decisions;
1. The Chelsea handball where the defender had both arms raised and the ball clearly hit one of his raised arms. Why wasn't this reviewed by VAR?
2. The Newcastle game where the goalkeeper grabbed hold of Mane's leg with both hands to stop him scoring a goal. Why wasn't this reviewed by VAR?
3. The Villa game where Salah was clearly fouled in the area and nothing was given. Why wasn't this reviewed by VAR?
4. The game where Mane had a shot and was cleaned out. We've seen this given in quite a few games. What wasn't this reviwed by VAR?
5. The game where Milner had a two-footed in-the-air lunge on him. Why wasn't this reviewed by VAR?
I have another 40 examples I can think of off my head this season, so let's go through these and then we can get the next five and so on.
If we accept that these kind of decisions were made for/against teams in other games then how often are they given and what is the usual outcome?
I can think of maybe 2-3 where I thought mmm.. could have gone the other way that, but the number for/against doesn't appear to remotely stack up.
But the bigger question for me isn't the high-profile obvious mistakes by officials, it's all the niggly little decisions that break up our play. In the Atkinson game, on four occasions we had the ball and were breaking and the referee pulled it back for the foul. You can argue that this is the right course of action and 'playing advantage' is optional, but quite often these types of advantages seem not to happen. In that same game there were two studs-up tackles on Mane not looked at by VAR, but we can get to that later on.
The interesting thing is that I can come up with a very long list of 'dubious' decisions against us and those that say there is nothign to see can't easily balance out the 'dubious' decisions that we got.
Even the 'dubious' offside (Which I didn't agree with) where Chelsea were denied a goal, we can easily point at several 'dubious' decisions that have already gone against us this season in an identical manner.
You then look at the likes of Graelish (English) who dives all over the place and is given an incredible number of decisions. Then you look at Rashford (English) who dives in every game and gets pretty much every decision and then other players in other clubs that dive and then either get the decisions (Which broadly seems to go 'for' some clubs routinely and 'against' some clubs routinely)
So. To sum up. Do I think there is a vast, broad worldwide conspiracy? No
Do I think it's some kind of betting scam? No.
Do I think that we have referees that don't like our club or city because of whatever reasons giving them unconcious bias because either of where they are from or what clubs they favour? Yes.
But I think the main problem is that if you had a fully-fit, top-performing, top-referee then the bits of unconcious bias wouldn't really affect games in the way they do.
Todays referees live in a bubble. They answer to no one. When they fuck up, they still answer to no one. They can make different decisions for identical situations randomly (And do) and it's never looked into, it's never acknowledged and it's never looked at by the 'mainsteam media'.
So on top of their unconcious bias and their unaccountabilty, we then come to the nub of the matter. Most of them are fucking shite. The have demonstrated clearly several times this season that they literally don't know the rules of the game.
So when you add all the factors together then it starts to make a bit more sense;
* Unconcious bias
* Not fit
* Don't know the rules
* Unaccountable
* Don't like some clubs
* Don't like some cities
* Believe their own hype and think they are more important than the game
* Geninuely shit at their jobs
