ARCHIVE: Robbed!

Chris Barnes looks back in anger, like many of us, at that certain match at the end of last season when the Wanderers were well and truly duped.

I have never attended a football match that has had such a pronounced effect on me, as the play-off game at Ipswich. There are games like the Villa semi final were you come so close, but luck isn’t on your side. Then there are those games were the teams performance is simply inefficient à la Watford! But to lose a game to a referee who is so biased to the home side is untrue, and to give every message out that support this, is sickening, utterly and depressingly so! 

It leaves the kind of taste that is so bitter and long-lasting you know it will sour your palette for many more seasons. We have all witnessed games where the match official gives the opposition the odd decision here and there but not on this scale. Never in my life have I seen, heard or even read of an official who played so evidently as the twelfth man.

Three penalties against us is an unusual situation in itself, particularly when two of them were as questionable as they were, but to add to that nine men booked and two sent off from the Wanderers, well, some people will tell you statistics don’t lie – or do they!!!

What capped it all off though, were the views of Sam Allardyce at the end of the game. He curiously noted that when Ipswich went into the lead, the referee ran back to the half-way line with a smile on his face! Personally I’m surprised he didn’t just embrace George Burley.

However Sam’s statement almost hits the nail on the head, what we all suspected was that we had a bent referee, YES, A BENT REFEREE!!, in a game with not only a place in the hallowed Premier League riding on it, but with millions of pounds at stake as well. That in itself is something worth thinking of. Maybe Ipswich had decided that there was only one way they were ever going to get through the play-off minefield. 

And so back to ‘Planet Reality’, another season in division one minus the likes of Gudjohnsen and Jensen, paltry gates, apathy from the Bolton public, and Sam trying to continue the miracle of resurrecting our fortunes with his hands tied behind his back. It kind of puts things into perspective, the power that the man in black possesses!!!

First appeared in Issue 31 of White Love in autumn 1999.