Referees and the 'advantage' rule

[Shuggie]

I might have the rules mixed up but what really got me riled up was right near the end of the game, their player went down with a head injury and we had possession. Ref rightly stopped play but then didn't have the physio come on for treatment. I thought a head injury was an automatic "get the physio on" situation. Then the sod gave the ball to the Wigan keeper!

Perhaps the ref did the right thing and it was the Wigan keeper being an unsportsmanlike git but surely the ball should have come back to us?

It should have been a drop ball at the point where play was stopped, theres no way the ref shouldve handed it to their keeper 15 yards from where it was when he blew his whistle. Also did anyone notice the amount of times their players brought the ball down with their arms?

It was a tragedy ... CMS had chased down the defender, won the ball off him and was about to bear down on goal and score (for fun) when the referee brought the real-life enactment of the song to an abrupt end. It was a real moment of pathos instead of a climactic moment of musical theatre. I haven't felt so cheated of a perfect ending since 1983.

Anyway, how come the players just meekly let the ref take away such a huge positional advantage when they spend the rest of the game belly-aching about every decision, demanding cards and generally behaving like twats? I just don't get it.

If you want to argue that the ref blew before CMS won the ball, fine but it's is only a point of order ... I still don't understand why players are so submissive in these situations but spend the rest of the game puffed up with indignation at every opportunity. Would they be breaking some sort of honour code leading to moral outrage?

And then there was at least one fantastic tackle (an unspecified Bennett maybe) that won the ball clean as a whistle. How the hell was that a foul?

Yours in confusion.