General Premier League Thread 2024-25

hh

TNT sound like they'll be donning black ties for the sad lose of Declan Rice

Ref rightly books a keeper for wasting time during injury time. But instead of adding on whatever time was wasted, he blows it up directly at the end of the stated added time! Makes no sense

Only to the biased and blind.

Anyone with any semblance of knowledge about football knew it was never more than a yellow.

Clearly Romero is better than all of them.

🤣 yeah he’s a bit mad alright but I think he’s managed to rein that in a bit.
His tackling, positional sense, strength, and passing range is top notch.
Speeds not bad either but that doesn’t matter when you’ve VDV next to ya!

VVD has went back a bit over the last twelve months. I think it's the armband, he seems stressed a lot of the time since he became captain both for club and country.

Martin Keown looking stupid here. First pure Arsenal bias, then condescending tone to the Brighton boss, as if he had a cheek to try and get a result at The Emirates.

Generally seems to be putting forward a view that you should be allowed cheat a little, as long as you don’t cheat a lot?

Everybody knows that Keown is Arsenal through and through. It's not stupid when you know that.

Yeah, but why bring the managers age into it? I get the first bit, but not that.

ridiculous 2nd yellow imo. The level of inconsistency in the English game is off the scale. Brentford player on the ground last week punches the ball away - no 2nd yellow. Rice tips the ball 6 inches with his foot - 2nd yellow.

'Kicking the ball away' isn't a specific offense called out

'Delaying the restart of play' is the actual offense. 99% of the time, it's because the ball is kicked away so it's much of a muchness. But in much the same way, a player refusing to retreat or holding onto the ball or dancing in front of a FK to be taken or pulling his willy out would prevent play from restarting, it is treated the same.

Rice was stupid, as was the defender, but in black and white it's the right call. Personally I'd like the officials to exact some reasonable common sense - well, maybe not these officials.

Generally people tend to view ‘common sense’ as being the thing that leads to the outcome they want.

Rice did a stupid thing and got punished for it. Others have and will definitely do stupid things and get away with it, but that’s a conversation about those incidents rather than this one.

Not suggesting he should let it slide because he was already booked, as I said, the ref was correct in his interpretation of the rules (not to mention Rice was stupid), but the defender was also taking advantage of the situation kicking the ball towards Rice, who was actually walking away from the foul - ideally perhaps the ref should review the incident itself as opposed to making it fit a prescribed set of rules. Put it down to two players taking the piss and drive on.

No point getting into demanding pure, explicit consistency when others are freely allowed to boot the ball away down the pitch to prevent a throw-in being taken quickly and taking no action - and then saying the ref's hands are tied when a fairly innocuous event results in a team being reduced.

I'm no fan of Rice, or Arteta's whingey Arsenal side, but I think a modicum of common sense could have resolved that today.

It's part of the issue with football nowadays - trying to make every incident definable within a binary set of rules.

But Rice did the thing he was booked for. Everything else there feels like logic gymnastics.

Yeah and he should have, that's a mistake.

He was still correct to give Rice a second yellow.

Don't think anyone is disputing what he was booked for - I even literally say it in what you quoted and a couple posts before that ??

I'd question the incident should alternatively be judged on it's own merits. In this particular case, I'd argue there was a little more at work than a restart of the play. People can say the defender was 'clever' or whatever, and that Rice kicked the ball 6 inches away, but I think a ref should be able to look at that incident and use his own judgement. I doubt he even saw the ball being kicked at Rice to begin with

Everton my god how did they throw this away

Surely Dyche will be shown the door. Moyes reunion maybe