He might not be. I don’t know. I don’t know Mr Knight. With people I don’t know, I tend to assume they are honest fair-minded people. So I need to discover another explanation for the way in which Mr Knight refereed Saturday’s game. It is not hard to find.
Football is a skilled game played to fairly simple rules. But we like, at the higher levels, to have an independent person regulating how those rules are applied in matches and making independent decisions where the players themselves would argue. This is a common phenomenon. Many areas of life are regulated. One of the most common features of effective regulation is to ensure the regulators are truly independent and are not subject to undue influence from those they regulate. But in the FA Premier League this principle has been turned on its head. We have “career” referees. It is important to those referees that they stay on the FA Premiership list. We also have a system where the “best” referees get the “best” games. Then we have a system that means that the biggest influence in the regulating of the game is the clubs themselves and the big successful clubs have by far the greatest influence. So Mr Knight turns up at Anfield wanting to stay on the Premier list. He wants to be coming back to Anfield to referee Liverpool v Manchester United. Liverpool have a large influence on these matters. We have very little. He’d probably marginally prefer to go to the Stadium of Light to referee Sunderland v Fulham than go to Molineaux to referee Wolves v Ipswich but frankly, as which of those fixtures are Premier league games might be reversed next season, he doesn’t care too much. So the opinion of Liverpool FC as to how he refereed the game is massively important to him; the opinion of Sunderland AFC is not very important at all.
Any human being subject to this state of affairs could turn in a performance like Mr Knight’s. His subconscious bias doesn’t need to be very great. Very early on the Sunderland players would have become aware that they more likely to be punished than the Liverpool players (both in being pulled up for free kicks and getting yellow cards). The Liverpool players would have also known this. Gary Breen would have known he might well get a second yellow card. Steven Gerrard would have known that he was very unlikely to. Aware of this, the players would moderate their approach to the game.
And so, in a game where we were already at a large disadvantage based on individual talent and playing away, the odds were stacked that much more against us. This is no surprise. The raison d’etre of the Premier League breakaway was to protect the interests of the larger more successful clubs. So it is not surprising that the lessons of regulation in all other walks of life are ignored and performances like Mr Knight’s are commonplace. We’ll get it at Old Trafford, Highbury and Stamford Bridge and when those clubs visit the SoL. We’ll even get it to a lesser extent when we play clubs like Aston Villa and Tottenham.
It is a pity that Mr Knight so dominated the outcome of the game because actually we played rather well. Not the gutsy minnows desperately trying to hold their own stuff of our 0-0 draw a few seasons back, but actually playing some nice passing football. The 4-5-1 worked very well and we matched them all across the pitch. I imagine all of the players would have been fairly pleased with their performances. Again the sucker punch was a curling free kick sneaking in at Davis’ left hand post. I’m not sure where I stand on this argument generally but one can’t help but think that if we put a man on that post for such free-kicks our points tally might now look very different.
Some of the players deserve a mention. Stubbs was excellent. I am very excited about what he can bring to the team. Nosworthy came in for a bit of criticism last week (although he was only on for 10 minutes) but I thought he had a really good game at Anfield. Whitehead was immense. He is rapidly dispelling any doubts as to his Premiership credentials. Arca, who I sometimes am critical of, played a very sensible game, using his considerable talents to effect rather than just to showboat. Lawrence, who I really doubted could cut it in the Prem, played very well. And Elliott coming on as sub terrified the Liverpool defence, often having four men trying to get the ball off him.
But overall this was a good team performance. One can’t hide the fact that two games in we have no points and no goals but I think looking at the performances against Charlton after we weathered their very early domination up until our disastrous attempt to reshuffle when Ambrose was sent off and the performance at Anfield there are a lot of positives. We do just need to start getting points on the board. If rumours are to be believed we are getting that Brascilla bloke, which is good. Whatever your views of Robinson (and I’m in the “he does a canny job” camp) it is madness to only have one specialist defensive midfielder on the books.