Brain damage

If you’ve watched or listened to any football programme or podcast since Saturday, you will have seen or heard various pundits discussing Man Utd’s second goal against Spurs. You can watch the incident here.

Most people seem to blame Gomes, the Spurs keeper, for the resultant goal and as he committed the school boy error of not "playing to the whistle" that's too where I place the blame for Utd ending up with two goals. The referee doesn't stop play, clearly trying to allow Spurs an advantage as the ball is in the hands of their goal keeper. Gomes tries to clear the ball down field, but only when he can't find an unmarked Spurs player does he then put the ball down to take the free kick, that the referee hasn't awarded, 10 yards further forward from where it should have been taken, had it been awarded (which again it hadn't).

The referee, Mark Clattenburg, has come in for some abuse over allowing the goal, much of which has been unjust and in some cases no more than "all referees are rubbish, therefore this was a rubbish decision"!. In my view he did nothing wrong, indeed with less than 10 minutes to play by not stopping the game for an unnecessary free kick he was ironically  helping Spurs make a quick counter attack.

Harry Redknapp, the Spurs manager, has been the most outspoken of his teams staff over the goal, claiming that "it was a farce" and basically genuinely believing that the referee should have given a free kick for the handball (and maybe as some have argued booking Nani for deliberate handball).

To my mind the acid test is this. If Clattenburg had blown for the hand ball and stopped Gomes while he was trying to clear the ball, to bring the play back to the correct place for the "free kick" to have been taken from, would Harry and others have said "good decision ref" or would they, as I suspect, have shouted abuse at the ref "for stopping the game when we're trying to counter attack". Because if they would have then Clattenburg did the right thing and what followed was both legal and Gomes fault.