By arguing Mikel’s red card is valid does not represent our ignorance to football. Instead it represents that you are watching replays through blue tinted glasses. Mikel overhit the ball and it ran faster than he could catch. Evra was clearly going to nick the ball away from Mikel. Mikel, instead of trying to get the ball, decides to intimidate Evra by raising his studs towards the ball in general (but the intimidation was clearly aimed at Evra’s ankles). Evra failed to jump away and was duly caught.

Take off your blue tinted glasses and watch the replays again before claiming any thoughts contrary to yours are ignorant.

I don’t know about the specific match in question because I only saw the highlights.

However, if there are subs or injuries or time-wasting after the board is held up then a referee can add on as much time as is necessary. Otherwise, once the “2 minutes” is up, players could deliberately time-waste, feign injury etc in the knowledge that after 2 minutes the ref would have to blow the whistle.

elvis, what do you mean “started so badly”? it is not hard to lose 2-0 at old trafford especially without drogba or lamps. and playing with only ten men for the better part of an hour, you have to be grateful that man utd were not on there day or we might have seen 4 or 5 goals the way terry and ben haim were defending….

If the ref initially said to show 2 mins injury time, that will usually be relayed to the 4th official (who holds up the board) a couple of minutes before the 45th minute of the half.

Therefore, if he told the 4th official in, for example, the 43rd minute, that there was 2 minutes injury time, then there is 4 minutes from the time he tells the 4th official to the time that the game is likely to end. Within those 4 minutes, if the ref decides that someone has wasted time, there is a substitution, an injury or whatever then he is free to add on as much time as necessary on top of the original 2 minutes. I didn’t see the game live so I don’t know if that is a possibility – but the 2 minutes is a guide to players and fans, it is NOT the limit that the referee is allowed to play for.

Same principal with “dissent” for Rooney i.e. he clearly was dissenting. It is then up to the ref if they feel it warrants a yellow for the offence. If refs gave more yellows then the game would be a better place – a flurry of red cards for a couple of weeks would get Terry and Rooney et al to stop abusing the refs and benefit the whole of football.

As for giving a yellow to Rooney for a subsequent push… there actually is no “yellow card” offence for a foul. He could have given Rooney a yellow for “persistent foul play” but if Rooney had been generally well behaved since his yellow then there is no reason why he had to give a second yellow to Rooney at all. Again, down to ref’s opinion. If he saw it as Violent Conduct or Serious Foul Play then he could have given him a straight red… but in that case the fact he had earlier received a yellow is entirely irrelevant.

I didn’t see the Cole foul in the penalty area so can’t comment on that one.

Saha penalty was clearly a penalty though he made the most of it.

I think Joe Cole should have been sent off but again, I don’t think that’s automatic – I disagree with the ref but it is still down to his opinion about how dangerous or otherwise the tackle was.

In summary – I might not have agreed with the decisions but if you actually know the laws of the game you would realise that there is significant room for interpretation of the laws. It is not like the Chelsea offside decison against Blackburn that was clearly, factually, the wrong decision.

I say again, go to http://www.thefa.com and do a refs course somewhere near you… there’s a big shortage… see if you can do better

An awful decision, from an Arsenal fan