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Now we know that it's us versus the world now
Since I’ve had the privilege of shifting the blog from rebel propaganda to focusing on football matters, there have been weeks when it’s been a struggle to find anything interesting to say. 0-0 draws where very little happened and the result was of very little consequence. They’re a pain in the arse, to be honest.
And then there are weeks like this last week, when I had the best part of a thousand words written on Monday without mentioning any of the match action at all, and with another match still to be played. It presents a different problem, trying to find the time to write the epic rant that it deserves, but it’s much more enjoyable.
OK, I know that I said last week that if we couldn’t beat the team that’s bottom of the league, at home, then we should fold the club. I didn’t expect it to be 9 men vs 12 for the majority of the game, though. Perhaps I should have.
📸 Oldham Athletic
The club were keen to let us know that Kavanagh and Fondop were friends again, and they both had chances in the first five minutes. Kavanagh shot wide across goal in the opening seconds; Fondop headed over the bar. But someone was keen to let us know that he didn’t think the players were the ones we’d paid to see.
Fourteen minutes in, Payne slid in on Orsi and won the ball. It might be the best tackle he’s ever put in. David Rock – and yes, I will, for once, be referring to the referee by name throughout – decided otherwise and sent him off. It wasn’t even a foul.
We responded by bringing Pett on for Fawunmi. I’m not a fan of bringing off an attacking player for a more defensive player when you’re down to ten players, I think it invites more pressure. With Appiah-Forson missing with a knee injury, we could really have done with Fawunmi’s pace. Maybe David Rock thought the same, and maybe that’s why he booked someone on our bench, the fucking wanker.
Given how poor Crawley have been this season, I was still hopeful that we’d get a result with ten players, but the self-appointed star of the show destroyed the match as a contest half an hour in. Kane Drummond raised his foot to control a ball that he was perfectly entitled to go for, and Jennings ran onto it from behind him as he did. The referee who seemed entirely unconcerned with Oli Hammond’s welfare at Harrogate last season blew for a foul, made a big theatrical show of checking on Jennings, and sent Drummond off. An hour of the match to go, and it was nine players vs eleven plus a cunt with a whistle. A tall order.
Crawley had the ball in the net shortly before half-time when Aderoju headed the ball out of Hudson’s hands, but to the surprise of everyone, David Rock actually applied the laws of the game and awarded the foul. Well fucking done.
I must condemn what happened as the officials left the pitch at the break. Please respect people’s mobility aids. Someone else’s crutch is not your weapon. They need that to walk, don’t be chucking it around.
David Fucking Rock wasn’t done. Rather than speak to Scott Davies and tell him he needed to calm down, like a half-decent referee might, he showed him a red card without saying a word as soon as he approached him. What a fucking shitbag.
He picked up where he left off at the start of the second half, awarding Crawley a free kick as a reward for fouling Fondop five minutes in. Shortly after, our depleted resistance was broken, with Orsi scoring from close range. One-nil to the referee.
We tried to get back in the game, bringing on Hill for Norburn. Hill got booked for handball six minutes after coming on. Of course he did. We could have brought on Abu Hamza and that fucker would have given handball against him.
We chased the game valiantly, but it was a Sisyphean task. Times were desperate enough for Mellon to bring Hawkes on for Kavanagh. Pett had a shot from outside the box that looked a lot like it hit a Crawley player’s hand, but of course nothing was given. Three minutes into stoppage time, Fondop flicked on a long ball from Hudson to Hill, whose shot appeared to have been tipped over by the keeper. Goal kick, full time, stand up if the ref’s a cunt. (Don’t worry about standing up if some dickhead’s thrown your crutch away, just shout really loud.)
Kai Payne is not a dirty player. If anything, he’s been criticised for not being quick enough to put a tackle in. As a pacy attacking player, Kane Drummond is more often on the receiving end of fouls than the perpetrator. But, like so many Oldham Athletic players before them, they apparently morph into a combination of Vinnie Jones, Norman Hunter and the fucking Kray twins when being officiated by David Rock.
We’re all guilty of getting hysterical about referees. We think they’re all biased against us; we focus on the decisions given against us and forget the ones that go in our favour; and we attribute to malice or conspiracy what can better be explained as human beings doing a difficult job, under intense pressure, making split-second decisions without the benefit of video replays with slow motion and multiple camera angles. It’s a dirty job, but someone’s got to do it.
However…. David Rock has now sent off four Oldham players in the last four Oldham games he’s officiated, and they have all been contentious, to say the least. We’ve had seven red cards since being promoted back to the Football League, and over half of them have come from one referee. He also refused to let one of our players receive medical treatment on the pitch after suffering a very obvious dislocated shoulder and accused him of play-acting. A cynic might feel that his performances have gone beyond incompetence, and betray, at best, an unconscious bias.
I’m not going to use the c-word. (Not that one, I’ll happily call him a cunt.) Cheating is the worst thing you can accuse a referee of, and it’s not something to throw around lightly. But the facts suggest that David Rock has an issue with Oldham Athletic, and that needs addressing. At this point, it wouldn’t surprise me if a video emerged of him drunkenly calling Micky Mellon a ‘Scottish cunt’. Hopefully his first name and his apparent difficulties in remaining impartial in his refereeing decisions are the only things he has in common with David Coote.
No-one could have blamed Mellon for absolutely raging about being robbed of three points. He quite correctly criticised how the game was officiated: "It's sad to think that the game's been influenced by a guy who didn't even play”. Credit to him, though, he focused on the professionalism and integrity of his players, and how proud he was of them: "The energy from everybody was amazing and the positives are we showed what a brilliant football club we are today, because we are, and the players responded to that emotion from the supporters, and it was good to be a part of that.”
I must confess, we weren’t at the game. Our mates had travelled up from London for the Manics and Suede gig at Co-op Live, and we made a bit of a day of it in Manchester. Third home game we’ve missed already this season. Unacceptable. Anyway, it meant we were explaining in the Spinners’ Arms that David Rock hates Oldham, and scousers, and is possibly a racist, and some other stuff that will get Oldham Fan Media sued if I repeat it.
We quite rightly appealed both red cards, and the result of the appeals wasn’t announced until Tuesday morning. At 8am on the morning of Northampton away, less than 12 hours before the game, we still didn’t know whether two of the players who started the previous game were available for selection. Not ideal.
Both appeals were rejected. Of course they were. Making the right decision and overturning both red cards would have meant acknowledging that, in a match that we narrowly lost 0-1, we wrongly had to play for over an hour with a two-player disadvantage. It would have meant acknowledging that, of the four red cards issued to Oldham Athletic by David Rock since our promotion back into the Football League (over half of the total number of red cards we’ve received in that time, remember), at least three were unjustified. (We couldn’t appeal against Woods’ red card at Harrogate because it was two yellows.)
When a team that is circling the drain of the Football League is 1-2 down at home and the match has to be paused due to fans peacefully protesting on the pitch with 11 minutes left, then The Integrity Of The Game is of the utmost importance, and those final 11 minutes must be played out in an empty stadium nearly two hours after match was paused, with no regard for the welfare of the players, “in order to maintain the integrity of the competition”. You absolutely cannot simply abandon the game and allow the result to stand, despite announcing an hour earlier that you would. No, those players who have been unable to keep themselves warmed up and flexible, and who weren’t expecting to have to play out the remainder of the game, because you said that they wouldn’t, will indeed play out 11 soul-destroying, futile minutes, to preserve The Integrity Of The Game.
But when a referee wrongly sends two players off and destroys the match as a contest, and almost everyone – including a least one former elite-level referee – agrees that neither challenge was a red card, and the referee issuing those red cards has a dubious record very specifically related to the club involved, then fuck The Integrity Of The Game. Fuck the players, fuck the manager, fuck the supporters, fuck the club. Close ranks, avoid scrutiny and difficult questions, nothing to see here.
None of which means I think referees deserve to get abuse. At grassroots level in particular, people go too far and it’s unacceptable. But supporters are entitled to be angry when their team loses out due to errors beyond the control of the players or the coaches, especially when there’s a pattern that suggests it isn’t just one-off honest mistakes. “Without referees, you wouldn’t have a game!” Cool. Are we going to use that to avoid scrutinising people’s standards of work and holding them accountable in other jobs?
We had every reason to feel sorry for ourselves. It was so blatantly unfair and left us without two players for three games for no reason other than to protect a (I’ll be as kind as I can here) useless referee. But Mellon’s unexpectedly inspirational pre-match presser ahead of the Northampton suggested that he might be using a shit situation to instil a siege mentality. Throw what you want at us. We’re Oldham Fucking Athletic. We’ll take you all on.
Let’s be honest, though, the first half at Northampton didn’t really reflect that. Call a spade a spade, it was pretty awful. Fondop had our best chance just over half an hour in, when Norburn crossed into the box after good work by Sutton and Kavanagh, but Mikey couldn’t quite control it and shot wide. It wasn’t a feast of football.
We did push forward more in the second half. One of the most entertaining things for those of us watching at home, though, was Roy chuckling at our fans singing ‘David Rock is a wanker’. Lovely stuff. Gave me the warm fuzzies.
Kavanagh and Fondop continued to link up well (see, they can get along), and Kav hit the bar after Mikey played the ball to him just under an hour in. We replaced one lesser-spotted player with another shortly after, with Nevitt coming on for Chilvers.
Northampton had a couple of shots against the bar as well, and it looked like it was going to peter out to be one of those 0-0 draws that I hate writing about so much. Then, in the 70th minute, we had a goalmouth scramble from Gus Scott-Morriss’ long throw, with Northampton blocking about 4 shots from within the six-yard box before clearing it out of the penalty area, where it fell to Norburn, who banged it in from near 20 yards, his first goal for us. Like a true captain, he led the team to run and celebrate with the coaching staff, including Scott Davies, whose red card the previous Saturday hadn’t been included in the referee’s report. And our fans responded with “are you watching, David Rock?”. LOL.
📸 Oldham Athletic
After we ran ourselves into the ground three days earlier with a two-player disadvantage (and a cunt with a whistle making it feel like a three-player disadvantage), it wasn’t that surprising that we hadn’t been all-out attacking and on the front foot all game, and it took a solid, gritty performance to see it out. Pett and Norburn bossed the midfield, Hammond came on for Kavanagh to give us fresh legs, and Fondop put in a shift at both ends of the pitch, proving once again to be our best defender at set pieces. Our first away win of the season, and the perfect response after the Crawley game. God, how we needed that.
(I couldn’t tell you what the referee’s name was on Tuesday, and that is exactly how it should be.)
I thought Mellon would be ecstatic after the game – there’s nothing he loves more than a triumph over adversity – but he looked understandably exhausted, and relieved. He acknowledged that it hadn’t been the most enjoyable game but praised the players for doing what had to be done: "Grit, hard work, togetherness, resilience - all those kind of words - tonight the boys showed that in spadefuls, so that was good." He was still frustrated at the red cards vs Crawley, and the decision to uphold them – weren’t we all? – but refused to give in to self-pity: “we will not play the victim, we will get on with things and we'll take whatever comes our way and we'll attack it.” Amen, brother.
Commiserations to our women’s team, who put in a spirited performance at Hyde Utd, but lost 2-1. We dominated the opening half hour and took the lead in the second half through Chelsea Cook’s powerful header from Paige Stopford’s corner. We couldn’t hold out unfortunately, and two goals in quick succession ensured Hyde Utd’s 100% record in the league remained intact. No punches thrown this time, which I guess is a good thing. We take on AFC Oldham at Little Wembley at 1pm on Sunday. Get down to Boundary Park early, make a day of it.
📸 Oldham Athletic
Commiserations also to my BPAS podcast comrades, who were pipped to Fan Media, Influencer, Channel or Podcast of the Season at the Northwest Football Awards by Brent Di Cesare’s/Mark Goldbridge’s That’s Football podcast, which was acquired by Gary Neville’s The Overlap network in April this year and rebranded as Overlap Daily. I can see why.
No football today, which I’m quite glad of, as it’s Andy’s birthday, and I’d rather it wasn’t ruined by another shite referee. If you see us out and about in Manchester or Stockport (quite the day out, I think you’ll agree), buy him a pint.
Hopefully his birthday weekend will be capped off with an FA Cup upset on Sunday. Sheffield Wednesday are still recovering from the Chansiri debacle, and appointed Dave Challinor as their new manager a few days ago. They’re currently 9th in League One, and it’s unlikely that we’ll beat them 4-0 like we did in pre-season. But if we do, we should get to keep John Sheridan. And maybe people will stop mistaking our badge for theirs. Whatever the result, I really hope that I’m not mentioning the fucking referee’s name once next week. If you haven’t already bought your ticket, why not? Get down and cheer the lads on to fight against whatever the fuck gets thrown at us this time. Bring it on. KTMFF.
Written by Arlene Finnigan
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