So, he is human, after all?

Let’s get one thing straight immediately. One of the biggest influences on the outcome of this game was one of the most appalling exhibitions of refereeing I’ve ever seen. From the moment early on, when Hector Sam was one on one with a central defender, knocked the ball past him, then to be cynically flattened in the perfect example of a yellow card offence, only for the ref to wag an admonishing finger at the offender and no more, the standards were set.

By half time, we’d had Gerrard go down in the box clutching his face after being struck by another defender. It was either a yellow for Gerrard, or a red for the Boston player. The ref, of course, did neither. He also went on to prove his total ignorance of the rules when Keates and Fox worked the ball forward, only for Fox to be flattened. The ref waved the advantage, the ball was hit forward and Butler was offside. Did he call play back for the free kick? Of course not.

However, as much as the referee played into the hands of a team fighting (literally, at times) for their lives, by letting them get away with murder, in that he hadn’t produced a single yellow by the interval when I saw at least four bookable offences, this was also a failure on the part of the Saddlers.

We did let ourselves get bullied out of this game far too easily.

The problem has to lie at the door of the Manager for this one. The midfield line up of Wright, Dobson, Pead and Keates always did look unbalanced and, even if he had wanted to solve the problem of Pead’s good form and Keates’s return by playing Dean wide left, it became obvious during the course of the first half that it just wasn’t working.

Given the fact the Money’s whole tactical system is based on having two solid central midfielders, with the creativity coming down the flanks, the fact that Keates just isn’t a wide player already put pressure on Mark Wright to produce. The fact that he had one of his “off” games just compounded the problem, witnessed by an incident in the second half when Keates and Dobson worked the ball well out to him on the wing, when he didn’t have a player within 20 yards of him and he still managed to hit the first defender. The game was crying out for the injection of pace on the flanks that Ishmel Demontagnac finally gave us. Mind you, I don’t know if he’d have got any protection from the ref either!

One of the major problems over the last two years was Merson’s complete inability to learn from his mistakes, to the extent of making new ones on top of the old ones, but let’s hope Money shows his worth by learning the lessons from this one. Let’s face it, it all gets harder from here on in, as clubs like Boston will be fighting for their lives.