I didn't catch the incident at the time. Two of us were looking at the screen wondering why the fuck Karius was lying on the ground after the ball was cleared. The TV cameras apparently didn't either, "apparently" as in the first I saw of it was on Twitter a couple of hours after the game — there were no replays shown that I saw (apologies if there were and I simply missed them), no esteemed pundits holding forth on what taking a crack to the head might do to a player's critical faculties (if they had, then I'm sure the consensus would have been that there was no excuse, that Karius should just "man-up"). The useless prick behind the goal didn't see it, nor the linesman. No one on the Liverpool bench saw it, obviously, but then I suppose they were a fair distance away and it is a fast-moving sport.
But you know the one person who doesn't have an out here, who may not have seen it but was explicitly told by the player that he had just been nailed with an elbow to the head? The referee. And he has no fucking excuse whatsoever for just waving the Liverpool goalkeeper away.
What little I know about concussions (gleaned mainly from reading about the genesis of the NFL's crisis) is that they can range from immediately debilitating, punch-drunk, "where am I?" symptoms to very mild to the point of seeming non-existent to the victim. It's an insidious injury (hidden beneath skin, bone and hair), and rendered all the more so by the outdated view espoused by some that you can just "shake it off". Maybe Karius should have stayed on the ground, maybe he should have drawn more attention to it, maybe his biggest crime is not being an utter fucking c*nt, the type of c*nt, perhaps, who would carry out assaults on football pitches in the name of winning. But the likelihood is that he didn't even know there was anything wrong when he jumped to his feet and pointed out to the referee that he had just had his bell rung. So it's pointless saying that Karius should have told the Liverpool bench that he was feeling the effects — in his own injured mind, he may not have even been capable of making that determination (which is to say nothing of factors like this being the biggest occasion of his career and feelings of not wanting to let his teammates down). I bet he couldn't have given you a reason why he rolled that ball into Benzema's path, or allowed Bale's shot, far less venemous than Kolarov's at Anfield, as I recall, to slip through his hands ("I tried to catch it, maybe I should have done it safer"). Many would have called those mistakes "brain farts". Turns out they were half-correct — they were the results of brain injuries and he shouldn't have even been on the pitch to commit them. Ironically, it would have been better for him (and maybe his team) had he been knocked out cold.
I'm gutted for him. The character assassinations I've seen carried out by people who should know better (I don't mean anyone here) have been disgusting in some cases, all the while ignoring Ramos' actions under the umbrella of "winning". What a man. You'd love him if he played for Liverpool, some said. No I fucking wouldn't. But yeah, he's a "winner", no consequences for him. There should be for the referee, however, the one man on the pitch along with Karius (who had just suffered an injury to his brain) to know what had happened. And he did nothing. Concussions are injuries to the brain and I recall reading that suffering one makes it more likely that you'll suffer another, that is unless you're immediately removed from the action and allowed time to heal. The referee doesn't have a stake in the result, but he does in the safety of those players. He utterly failed in that duty.
