Steven Gerrard and former PGMOL chief executive Keith Hackett agreed that one player should’ve been sent off in Liverpool’s defeat on Saturday afternoon.
The Reds were consigned to a 10th loss of the Premier League campaign by Brighton, for whom Danny Welbeck scored both goals, and Stephen Warnock blasted Arne Slot’s side as ‘soft’ and ‘easy to play against’ as they tamely surrendered to the Seagulls.
However, the visitors may have one bone of contention with the officials after Yankuba Minteh – who was already on a yellow card – went to ground rather easily under pressure from Jeremie Frimpong in the 35th minute, with no discernible contact between the two players.
Speaking on punditry duty for TNT Sports (via The Mirror), Gerrard admonished the Albion winger as he said: “I think he’s extremely lucky… The ball gets played in behind here, there’s no contact and he just goes over. It is a dive, in my opinion, and he gets away with one here. He’s very, very lucky.”
Hackett also felt that Minteh was fortunate to escape a second yellow card, telling Football Insider: “There should be only one outcome for this type of offence – a yellow card for attempting to deceive the referee by an act of simulation. If referees do not sanction, we will continue to witness this attempt to cheat.”
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The Brighton player did inded go to ground with suspicious ease, and having been booked just 10 minutes previously, he certainly took a chance by seemingly trying to exagerrate the extent of the contact from Frimpong, if indeed there was any.
Would the outcome of today’s match have been different if the Seagulls were one player light for more than half of the game? Possibly, but it’s a hypothetical question to which we’ll never get a definitive answer.
Liverpool may have legitimate grievances over that incident, but ultimately the first call of blame for this result must lie with Slot and his side, whose response to going behind to Welbeck’s second goal in the 56th minute was pitiful.
Put simply, the Reds needed to show a lot more intent if they were to salvage something from this match, and the passitivy from a team facing a desperate fight for Champions League qualification was inexplicable.
Minteh shouldn’t be let off the hook if he deliberately tried to con the officials, but LFC can’t pin this result on refereeing decisions – they simply did nowhere near enough to avoid a deserved defeat.
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