Just got back from watching the match and am thoroughly disappointed at the result.
Call me a sore loser, call it sour grapes, call it what you will but I’ll still tell you that I think Referee Mike Riley had a stinker of a game and let Middlesbrough get away with far too much. Every “foul” by a Bolton player was pulled up and even when decisions clearly should have gone our way they didn’t. I mean, if 40 fouls but only 4 yellow cards doesn’t tell the tale of a stop-start game I don’t know what does. The referee missed two crucial decisions that should have gone Bolton’s way and even had the audacity to give Ricketts only a yellow card for blatantly telling him to “piss off” to his face.
The sad thing is that referee Mike Riley hasn’t just cost us the cup, he’s lost us millions in revenue that would have been generated by playing in Europe next season.
Now we face losing some of our big name players such as Okocha, Djorkaeff and Campo. However, if we manage to keep hold of one individual… then please let it be Sam Allardyce. Having watched managers come and go over the years I firmly believe that he is the greatest manager we have ever had and probably will have had for some time to come.
Middlesbrough played well and put together some good attacking football on occasion, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they should have won. I’m not even insinuating that Bolton deserved to win either, as some of our “big name” players just didn’t perform on the day. It’s just that if the game hadn’t been centred around the referee then it might have been a better game altogether.
Oh well, back to the Premiership and let’s hope we can get into the top half of the table and maybe even Europe.