Generally agree with this guy when he reviews referees performances but actually praising Dowd?!
http://www.football365.com/referee365/0,...66,00.html
So it comes to this - Newcastle v Arsenal, February 5th 2011. A simply amazing game, history-making and title race shaking, full of drama that if written as fiction would be dismissed as corny and far-fetched. I don't even recall Melchester coming back from 4-0 down to draw 4-4. Especially not if they'd sold Blackie Gray for £35m to Portdean earlier that week.
As far as major refereeing calls go, we'll start with the dismissal of Abou Diaby, which was really the turning point of the game. Now I understand Arsene Wenger's point about Diaby having suffered a severe leg injury in the past, which may go some way to explain the midfielder's reaction, but that cannot come into referee Phil Dowd's head. I thought he got the decision spot on.
There was nothing at all wrong with Joey Barton's challenge. He anticipated the situation brilliantly, took the ball very cleanly, and for me wasn't even all that reckless. In fact I don't think it was reckless at all. Sometimes there is bound to be contact between players in a challenge. It doesn't give Diaby the right to shove people in the head if he doesn't like it.
I think his grab on Barton, then a violent push and a subsequent shove to Kevin Nolan got him sent off. If he had done just one of these acts he might have got away with it, but cumulatively, Mr Dowd saw it as worthy of a red. I have to agree.
I'll now leap to the incident which saw the cautions of Wojciech Szczæsny and Kevin Nolan, because it is obviously comparable. This is probably the moment where I will need my tin hat at the ready, because I believe once again Phil Dowd got it RIGHT.
I will say that I understand entirely the argument that people will have saying that what Nolan did to Szczæsny was the same as Diaby on Barton, but I respectfully disagree. I believe a major contributing factor in Mr Dowd deciding to dismiss Diaby was that there were three parts to his offence leading to the sending-off. If Diaby had just have grabbed Barton, or just have pushed Nolan, then he may just received a caution. I even think that the push to the head by Diaby isn't all that bad, and would probably in my book just be a yellow card. I think Nolan reached out and grabbed Szczæsny, but I didn't think he transgressed the laws to the extent that he ought to have been sent off.
The term in the law book is 'Violent Conduct', and it states, as we have discussed in this column recently, that the definition of this is 'excessive force or brutality'. In my eyes, I don't believe that either Diaby's push to the head or Nolan's grab at Szczæsny could be considered to use excessive force or brutality. At this point you could argue that Diaby, then, should not have received a straight red, but instead two consecutive bookings. I'd concede you have a point, but that ultimately it doesn't matter in the context of this one game.
Moving on to Newcastle's two penalties, and for me it's one right and one wrong. I think in the first instance Koscielny was clumsy, leaned in and tripped his opponent. I can't fault that decision. The second was more suspect. I can only imagine it was given for a perceived push by Tomas Rosicky, but contact there seemed minimal, if at all. Simply a mistake, in my eyes, by the assistant referee. An AR, incidentally, who got an offside decision badly wrong when Leon Best thought he'd pulled another goal back at 1-4.
All in all, I thought Mr Dowd did a good job in the major incidents that I have seen. Whoever said that no-one wants to see a red card, or that they ruin games, eh?
