I think the most obvious answer to this is Suarez, that last season was in my opinion the most dominant performance by any player in a single premier league season. If that Liverpool team had been as good as the current Liverpool or Man City sides I have no doubt that he would have scored close to 40 even without penalties.
The difference here is that Everton has posted their losses so it is easy for the prem to look at it and say that it is over the 105m limit over 3 years and there isn’t really any debate about that. With City and Chelsea they have to prove that the money recorded in their income came from disallowed sources and that is a much harder case which involves a lot of lawyers and time. So it’s not really a case of Everton being poor so much as Everton has admitted to breaking the rule while City is denying it and I’d assume Chelsea is as well but I haven’t really read much about their situation yet.
Bullshit because Haaland realises that he wasn’t going to get to the ball so flopped to the ground in a completely unnatural way to buy a penalty, and I’d say the same if another team got a penalty in the same situation, but as we’ve seen this season City are the team that get the soft penalties and not the other way around
As much as it pains me to defend Man City I can’t agree with that, it was blocking a clearance from his own keeper, if anything a handball in that situation is more likely to create a chance for the opposition than to block it which it may well have done if Sterling hadn’t stopped to appeal for the hand ball and had instead put pressure on Gvardiol who had the ball in a much more dangerous position than he would have been if the ball hadn’t been obstructed.
The handball was a case of the ref/linesman not seeing it and because it was outside of the box VAR couldn’t do anything so I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt even if I think it was pretty incompetent of them not it be watching properly. The first pen was a pile of bullshit though.
I hate it when people say he got the ball first as a blanket excuse for why something shouldn’t be a penalty or foul, if you gently nudge the ball and it goes a couple feet like you see here then there is no reason that a standing Broja can’t easily go on to shoot in which case you may as well not have touched the ball for all it did. Maybe if the ball had actually gone any real distance I would listen to the argument but in cases like this it just makes anyone saying it look like an idiot.
I should have specified that I was more referring to fans, the media was not too hard on Klopp but I think that a lot of that can be attributed to the level of support behind Klopp from the Liverpool fan base, if there isn’t a push for him to go from the fans then the clicks aren’t there for articles calling for his sacking, ETH on the other hand has a divided fan base and that drives views towards any pundit that wants him out.
That could be due to a number of factors, first of all Klopp had a huge amount of good will from the Liverpool fans built up which ETH hasn’t had the time to do yet. ETH also has a habit of making some fairly strange decisions both in game and in the starting 11 even for positions that don’t have bay injury worries which provides ammunition for anyone who doesn’t want him, he also seems to struggle a bit with man management which for a team that has so many divas in it can cause issues. Regardless of that I think that anyone who wants him sacked is making a rash decision.
I can tell you that we didn’t get that courtesy, the number of people saying that Liverpool was finished or Klopp had been found out in 20/21 when we lost most of our defence and much of our midfield was baffling, it was as if they couldn’t comprehend that losing half our midfield and having to use our 5th and 6th choice center back options for a large amount of the season was not going to let us be competitive.
It’s because it isn’t English refs so they don’t have someone in their ear telling them to be nice
I get so frustrated that so many fans try to mitigate the effect that an injury crisis can have on a team unless it’s their team, maybe it’s because I’m a Liverpool fan and we seem to get really unlucky where our injuries just concentrate in a certain area of the field instead of spreading out evenly, this was particularly the case a few seasons ago with the defence and last season with the mid field.
I might be enjoying the torrid form that United is in but I find the level of mockery directed towards ETH to be pretty excessive with how badly decimated their defence has been, especially considering that it left them without their entire first choice back four for a while.
North Macedonia beating Italy 1:0 in the World Cup playoffs in 2022 to prevent the from getting to the tournament was pretty impressive.