There are so many idiot pundits who can’t distinguish between the rules and what they think the rules should be.What has been particularly eye-opening from all this fallout is just how many pundits and football journalists don't actually know the rules of football.
No one can possibly dispute the fact that it was a wild and reckless lunge that deserved a red card, but they couldn't send him off because the ball was not in play and it was not an act of Violent Conduct where the laws of the game do allow a referee to send a player off when the game is dead.
So Pickford survived because of a technicality, but a very important technicality. It's why referees have no decision to make if a player was to deliberately bring down an attacker who's clean through on goal if they were offside. If the player was onside then yes, clear professional foul and a red card, but because he was offside the entire action in void.
It's just incredibly basic stuff. I saw an article by Martin Samuel yesterday and he actually said that Pickford could have still been sent off and actually used Slaven Bilic getting sent off at half time against us as evidence for it. In what possible way is a manager getting sent off for abusing a referee and Pickford making an honest attempt at blocking a ball that had an unfortunate consequence the same thing?
And a further point, and possibly most dementing of all, is that we have just witnessed a biased Liverpool media campaign to get Pickford retrospectively banned. Make no mistake, the FA were not looking at this incident in any way shape or form. They wouldn't have had a leg to stand on (excuse the pun) to ban Pickford retrospectively under any single law of the game. Despite that though, we've seen comparisons to Roy Keane's challenge on Haaland, pundits describing it as an 'assault' and all the rest of it. They have tried to pressure the FA to get one or our players banned without proper cause, make absolutely no mistake about that.
It's truly disgraceful how infested the media is with them.
