I am merciful. I do not agree with the suspension of this referee. He made an honest mistake. Even if it was a rather late to whistle. It was a mistake in the moment. It is very different from misjudging a VAR call. The ref immediately took notice of his mistake and apologized. Mistake on the job. Move it on.
If the Napoli game didn't happen, perhaps I'd be more merciful. If refs didn't consistently make these "oopsies" against us, I would shrug my shoulders, and say that it is just one of those games.
The problem is, that it is this consistent pattern. What bothers me more is that Gyasi was able to stay on the field after committing
multiple professional fouls while on a yellow card.
Yes, we should have put the game away. There's no doubt about that. But when we talk about ref errors only in a vacuum, this infuriates me. It's not just in the big decisions, because VAR is there for penalties, but second yellows, niggling fouls, and even
advantage is not something I want to tolerate. Then let us have full review over everything, because this incompetence is costing us points. Disproportionately so.
Linesmen are told to hold their flags because of the
potential for error. Shit, Van Dijk tore up his knee because of the need to delay offside calls. These refs know that advantage is a thing, and you're talking about a winner. It was in, it was done.
The worst part is having to see this level of incompetence derail our CL hopes and now our ability to compete for a title.
There is no compensatory mechanism for these sorts of ref errors, unless they want to award us the 3 points, then I find this sort of "oops" to be empty.
The management team don't shit on officials publicly because they have class, and that's great, but they thought that approach would be the proper one after the Napoli game. Here we are a few
weeks later and it happens in an even more egregious fashion?
Unless your "move it on" was for me to stop berating this point, which I respectfully disagree and unless I have to actually stop, I won't because in light of having to hear about red cards not impacting games.
AND WORSE a shitty analogy with a Genoa game in which the party that would have gotten a foul,
got their goal. Juve didn't get fucked over, they didn't stop, the goal stood. It's not even a good fucking analogy.