Sam Allardyce has continued his latest hobby of whinging about things that are patently his fault to begin with. First, he kept going on about losing players to the African Nations Cup despite, we hope, knowing full well the implications of signing them in the first place. Now, he’s still moaning about the fact that Graham Poll and his referee team decided to use earpiece technology to keep in constant contact with each other throughout Bolton’s match against Fulham.
So what does Allardyce object to? Is it the instant communication between a match referee and his linesmen? Is it the speed with which he can receive their opinion on key decisions he perhaps didn’t get decent look at?
“It must have had an influence on Graham Poll’s decision making to cause so much mayhem between two sets of players,” he said on Sky Sports News. “A man of his experience should not have allowed that happen.
“We have come away not very happy about the outcome and being fined for receiving that amount of bookings and it is something I have expressed to the people concerned.”
That’s it. No complaints about particular decisions or evidence that the new technology affected the match adversely, Graham Poll’s earpiece didn’t fall out at inopportune moments leading to missed penalty claims, Big Sam is just upset he ‘wasn’t told’ and instead saw seven of his Bolton players almost certainly rightly booked for their thug tactics now that the match official finally received the entire story for each incident. He’s angry because maybe he would have told Kevin Davies not to drive his elbow into the temple of Fulham’s defenders had he known that he would’ve been caught.
“The big problem is the fact we should have been told well in advance for the reasons they were going to use it and we should have been told why they were going to use it and we should have had the opportunity to say no.
“This is a high profile game and if we want to allow someone to experiment in a game that could maybe affect the result one way or another, we should have the opportunity to say no if we think it might hinder us. We did not have that opportunity and that’s what upsets me the most.
No you shouldn’t. You don’t have the bloody right to say no to the offside rule, or refuse to play only one goalkeeper so why would a manager be given the right to refuse technology that can only benefit the game?
Just yet another ill-thought out whinge from a man who is quickly losing respect amongst football fans (at least as far as we can tell from the message boards).