Imagine this: before the start of every sporting weekend, the dark masters of sport get together to plan how they can steal the headlines, whilst handing the humblest of pies to anyone that would listen to them. They looked far and wide for the members of this exclusive club and managed to come up with one so-called referee, and a few F1 drivers – maybe Full Tilt should have pushed for one of their Virgin drivers to be involved?
Saturday’s Premier League programme didn’t look massively exciting but that was before you saw that everyone’s favourite under-ager, 25-year-old Premier League “referee” Stuart Attwell, was taking charge at the ground that is home to a team who are amusing at the most boring of times. Attwell, famous for his random awarding of goals and questionable red card decisions, was at it again on Saturday afternoon.
It’s hard to tell whether Attwell is so bored at the state of Premier League football that he makes bad decisions deliberately or whether he really is that bad. Paddy Power will have some odds up shortly, but back to the match itself and apart from being far from consistent in his decisions, there was yet another of Mr Attwell’s favourite things: a controversial goal.
If you didn’t get round to seeing it basically Michael Turner, who may or may not have been the innocent party in this case, touched the ball back in the direction of his goalkeeper, by which time Liverpool striker Fernando Torres was on the ball, passed it to Dirk Kuyt who pushed the ball home into an empty net. Sunderland manager Steve Bruce was so irate he was even heard muttering something about rearranging Attwell’s facial features to resemble his own, but it had all calmed down by the final whistle, maybe down to the game ending in a draw – the score the controversialists didn’t want. Shattwell indeed.
Then came Sunday, and the sport where you can watch cars go round and round and round and round a circuit, and if they so much as go anywhere near each other there seems to be a rule that if your name isn’t Michael Schumacher it’s very bad – although the man who was bumped off the track this weekend is no stranger to controversy himself.
Lewis Hamilton must have thought his luck was in as he went up the outside of his main title rival, Australian Mark Webber, but little did he know that Webber has a small part of Schuey in him and stuck to his guns as Hamilton hit him going round the corner, and just a bump was enough to see that the former World Champion wouldn’t be completing the race. After the blatant cheating of two years ago, maybe it’s Hamilton’s just desserts that he met this fate.
Apart from Webber still clinging on at the top of the championship, you can be sure that the smile on Fernando Alonso’s face was bigger than anyone else could muster this weekend. Won the race, kept alive his chances at a third world title, and watched Hamilton come of the course. Now that’s a weekend.
