Ipswich Town let down by some poor refereeing at Sunderland
Referee 2 Ipswich Town 1. Well at least that’s what it felt like.
Another catastrophic performance from another man in black with a whistle has left Paul Lambert’s men returning back to Suffolk empty handed and feeling extremely hard done by.
Now, I can’t sit here and tell you The Tractor Boys played their opponents off the park on Tuesday night and should have been 4-0 up, because quite frankly they didn’t, and we weren’t. But in a relatively tame and cagey affair, The Blues did look the better team and the only side who looked capable of going on to the win the game. Until, up step referee Peter Wright.
Now I know a lot of people don’t always like to blame the officials, however, when his errors were as astonishing as what they were and have cost us at least a hard fought point against one of our promotion rivals, then I will certainly not be afraid to hang back.
Say one of our players had made a mistake which led to him being sent off, or gave a needless penalty away (which have both happened this season) we would all be absolutely livid with them. And this time it’s a referee who has cost us the match.
It’s baffling how bad the standard of officiating can be in this division and something really needs to change. I hope Mr Wright is assessed for his performance.
Anyway, as you can probably tell, I was slightly annoyed about that! But turning our attention to footballing matters now and I must give credit to what was, for 75 minutes, a half decent performance.
I can’t say Sunderland blew me away and on that viewing, I can’t see them being good enough to go up, but I was pleased with how well we dug in, kept the ball and looked a threat going forward.
We must focus on another tough test now, this time in the FA Cup, where The Blues will grace national television and boy oh boy, I think we could all do with an uplifting cup victory after that dark evening at the Stadium Of Light.
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