It’s time that we all stop cheating!

Although I hated the result, I quite enjoyed the Newcastle 0 Manchester City 2 game on Tuesday evening.

It wasn’t a swashbuckling, end-to-ender like the previous two matches, but it had enough action and tactical interest to keep me glued to the screen.

I thought Lewis Hall, Joey and Nick Pope were our best players on the night, with Hall maybe even deserving the MotM award despite finishing on the losing team.

A special mention as well to Lewis Miley, putting in another shift at right back. He was up against one of the most devastating wingers in Europe in Jeremy Doku and I thought he did pretty well. OK, he was skinned a couple of times early doors but tell me a specialist full back that that lad has come up against who hasn’t been left for dead two or three times in a game when he puts on the afterburners and heads for that dead ball line.

Lewis Miley will have learned a lot in that match.

The biggest talking point before the game was all about Semenyo being able to play despite having appeared in the competition for Bournemouth earlier in the season. This especially resonates with the long suffering toon fans, in light of our inability to play Martin Dubravka in the 2023 Carabao Cup Final, because he had already represented Manchester United in an earlier round.

Exactly why the EFL decided this was a beneficial change – and who actually made the decision last summer – remains obscure but it doesn’t require intellect of MENSA proportions to identify the teams most likely to benefit from it. We can all think of one this week, anyway!

However, that “debate” was very soundly relegated to the back burner thanks to yet another controversial incident involving the VAR team. Stuart Atwell and Craig Taylor took an eternity to come to a decision after Antoine Semenyo’s instinctive flick sent the ball into the back of the net.

Chris Kavanagh was eventually sent to the monitor and was mercifully swift in coming to a decision and cancelling the goal – much to the relief and delight of the home crowd and the disbelief of Chris “on the money” Sutton on the Sky commentary. His bottom line was that the referee was just “guessing” as to whether Pope or Wissa would have been able to move across and block the shot if the offside Haaland hadn’t been blocking their movement in that direction.

Well Chris, I have my own thoughts on that one. I can’t say for sure that either player could have reacted in time and got there but I CAN say with absolute certainty (no guessing) that because Haaland was there, they COULDN’T EVEN TRY. An offside player interfering with play. Simples!

If the officials had paid as much attention during the rest of the game they might have spotted Nico O’Reilly’s elbow on Bruno. When you think what the snake Brereton-Diaz managed to get Schar sent off for then that lad could count himself very lucky. It definitely looked deliberate to me.

On the subject of foul play, who knew what a dirty little sneak Bernardo Silva was?

Maybe a sign that the pace has deserted him and it’s the only way to compensate. As Louis Walsh might have said to him, “You’re like a little Johnny Giles”. Or maybe not “little” in this case. Sandro certainly seemed to take exception to his sly hacking and was keen to give him some payback later in the game.

Another hot topic, which has been trumpeted by a host of pundits and commentators recently, is the 30 second rule for injury treatment. In this match, it centred on Jacob Ramsay’s head injury which resulted in him being off the pitch when Man City scored their first goal. I didn’t see the incident as a deliberate foul but it certainly disadvantaged us at a crucial moment in the game.

This is a difficult one. We all know that professional footballers will take any advantage they can, no matter how slight. Feigning injury is now an art (a dark one, apparently) and the authorities had to do something to try and discourage it. Being removed from the game for 30 seconds was their answer. Goalkeepers, of course, are exempt from this which is why they go down with such regularity, clutching a knee or a hamstring – thus giving the team a breather and the coach a chance to reorganise.

The flip side of most disputed refereeing decisions is invariably cheating by the players – shirt pulling, diving, feigning injury, delaying dead ball kicks etc and it’s become an impossible task to sort it all out correctly.

I have seen calls for the perpetrator of a challenge that injures a player to also leave the pitch for the 30 seconds. That’s all well and good if there actually IS another player involved in the incident AND it’s was an opposition one! What if there’s a tangle of bodies, in the goalmouth perhaps, and the ref can’t tell who was responsible? What we have is imperfect and, at times, unfair but I really don’t see an obvious and equitable solution other than the players and managers – and ours are as culpable as anyone else’s – agreeing that “It’s time that we all stop cheating”!

We didn’t used to do it and it’s ruining the game even more than any VAR delays.

At 2 -0 a lot of people are saying we’re out of it now and should cut our losses.- that we should bail out and play the “kids”? Well, I have three problems with that. First off, I don’t think we are out of it even at 2-0 down. It’s a tough task but Bayyer Leverkusen beat them 2-0 at the Etihad in November and Spurs won there 2-0 in August. They do concede goals and they can be beaten on their home turf. We should never throw the towel in

My second objection is basically a moral one. This is the semi final of a competition in which we are the reigning champions. Champions do not throw their hands in the air and give up. Not only is that morally unacceptable but it also undermines the integrity of the competition and is disrespectful to the other participants. We could even find ourselves being penalised for, basically, not trying. Remember Leeds United v Southampton and then Derby back in 1970?

My third objection is more practical. I don’t think we have a strong enough bunch of “kids” to give Man City a game.

So, we have to go in hope and give it our best shot. If nothing else we owe it to the fans (ALL football fans) for the Champions to go out with a bang not a whimper.

The one piece of news that buoyed me up on that sad Tuesday was the revelation that the club is reportedly about to formally commit £200 million pounds to develop a state of the art training centre based on the Woolsington Hall estate. This is news we have all been desperate to hear and I think it puts to bed all the daft rumours that the Saudis, despite their ongoing investment in the club, had “lost interest” in the project and were looking to bail out.

It’s an exciting prospect. The last such development that I remember happening was Leicester City’s new complex which opened in December, 2020. They spent £100 million on it. In the intervening five years, cumulative inflation in the UK has been about 28/29% so – even allowing for building materials probably rising even faster in price – £200 million seems a very healthy budget. Sir John Hall must be laughing all the way to the bank!