I have an uneasy feeling that one assistant referee involved in the Chelsea vs Wigan game on Saturday will not be gracing many more Premier League stadiums this season.
Despite being a Chelsea fan, with all the frustrations that entails, I really can't defend either of Chelsea's two goals, which were both offside and, to be brutally honest, tough but relatively straightforward decisions for such experienced assistants.
For Chelsea's first goal, Ivanovic dawdled out of the Wigan six yard box after an attack, only to see the ball returned into the area from outside the penalty area. He was about a yard offside.
For the second goal, it was a tougher decision to make: Calls which demand a certain amount of retrospective thinking can be really complicated to an assistant to give. Torres unleashed a bullet from about 15 yards out that rebounded off the post into the path of Juan Mata and the ball bounced off him into the net. When Torres shot, Mata was a foot or so offside and so should have penalised.
Don't get me wrong, these are tough decisions to get right, but we expect our officials to catch them.
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