I’ve made an enemy. And when I say ‘I’ I mean, ‘we’ and when I say ‘enemy’ I mean the editor of and contributors to Crewe Vital Football. Man, they’re angry.
I made a joke on Twitter that got re-tweeted by said editor. He then went on to say that we’re worse ‘than Vale fans’. Which is presumably very insulting indeed.
Anyway, it got me reading his site and wow, he’s got issues. Take the definitive moment in Saturday’s 1-1 draw:
“Referee gives goal. Oxford players cry offside. At this point every single Oxford player has surrounded the linesman. After a few minutes kerfuffle the referee whistles for a free kick to Oxford.”
This, he says, is “unbelievable”. Too right, players intimidating officials, officials not applying the rules properly… Oh hang on, what’s this?
“Now, the decision ultimately was probably the correct one.”
Ah. So, the ref’s ‘unbelievable’ decision was, in truth, correct. Looking at the incident, I reckon it was about 4 seconds between the ball going into the net and the ref heading towards the linesman. Not quite the scandal it first appeared to be.
A discussion forum topic called Wilder – Idiot continues the polemic.
To be fair, there are contributions that point out that the Alex need to man up if they’re expected to compete at this level. This is great though:
“His [Wilder’s] comments, just like his teams' tactics were dreadful - playing that high up the pitch at 1-0, well a better Crewe side would have stuck 3 or 4 past them easy.”
Oxford are shit, Chris Wilder is an idiot and Crewe are brilliant. Although, it should be pointed out that this is a fictitious Crewe playing scintillating football, not one that currently exists.
It goes on. Crewe have always been held up as a model of how a small club should be run. Modest, yet successful, four years ago they were voted the most admired club in the league. Their focus on player development and managerial stability should be an example to us all.
They've been relegated twice in the intervening four years. It seems, Crewe are some kind of art project and teams who don’t just stand aside are oppressors of their creative spirit. As a team that knows quite a lot about the damage a superiority complex can have, Crewe might do well to learn from us rather than treat us with such contempt.
3 comments:
Hang on mate, from our position behind the goal, I'm still pretty sure that it came off the keeper, and not Miller... And I think what we got more incensed about was the shoddy refereeing of a game that quickly got interrupted by continuous fouling by your players, summed up by the incident towards the end where he lost total control after what looked like a very dangerous tackle...
The Crewe fans all seem to be completely adamant that the reason the ref changed the decision was because he was told to by the Utd players. It's entirely plausible the linesman didn't flag because from his angle (and the chap commenting above) he mistakenly believed that it didn't hit Miller. I suspect the ref said to the linesman, 'the ball definitely hit miller, was he offside?'. This would be a perfect example of ref and linesman communicating properly to make sure the correct decision was made.
To be honest, even if it didn't hit Miller (which it did, I had the perfect view of it from the back of the big stand, almost directly in line with it), I would argue (correctly) that challenging the goalkeeper on his 6 yard line who then subsequently deflected the ball into the back of his own net would DEFINITELY be defined as 'being active' and 'interfering with play'.
The other thing the Alex fans are accusing the dirty, disgusting, cheating, disgraceful Utd players of doing was crowding and haranguing the officials. They have carefully ignored the moment Beano collided with the keeper in a 50/50 challenge at the far post and the Crewe players went on the rampage for about 3 or 4 minutes in the ref's face.
On another subject, I enjoyed the line 'a better Crewe would have put 3 or 4 past them'. What does that mean? 'If we were better at football, we would have beaten them'. What a ludicrous thing to say.
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