Quote Originally Posted by Syn View Post
There are certainties that you can do nothing about. e.g. the refs will always look to even things up. If they book 4 Stoke players, they'll give Koscielny a bullshit yellow for the sake of it.

But we can influence it. Our players don't even bother appealing for 50/50 pen shouts any more...they just assume they're not getting it. If we were a bunch of whiny ****s like Barca, we would get so many more decisions. Not through diving. But through moaning at the ref. Cesc was fantastic at that - he knew how to play the game. He would be at the ref's ear all game.

The crowd as well play a massive part. It's not possible to ignore 50,000 people thinking you've fucked them over. Against Newcastle, the fans got us that 5 mins added on. It may have been 3 or 4 without it, but it was 5 because they were booing Krul for time-wasting from the first minute. Everyone was made aware that Krul was taking his time and so an extra min or so gets added on. Stuff like that helps.
Good point, but the exception to the rule was the home game against Milan. You'd have thought the crowd getting on the ref's back would've worked in our favout, but it didn't. We got a couple of dodgy looking yellows in the first-half and, subsequently, the rest of the game was on a knife-edge.