Hourihane's Red Card

Can we please avoid using this as an excuse to attack the referee? It is a clear black and white issue. Once the ref indicates that the free kick must await the whistle taking it early is an immediate yellow card. That is it. No discretion, judgement or interpretation applicable. It's a stupid rule but it is as clear as day. The question is why did we start a dummy run free kick routine at all? Plain braindead.

It was a very poor decision by the Ref, but, on reflection, Hourihane was a grade-A pillock for putting the Ref into a position where he could make such a bad decision.

And it was clear that Hourihane was going to get himself sent off at some stage after that ridiculous tackle in the 2nd minute.

Could have been sentb off for the tackle alone .

Frank Bullitt wrote:

And it was clear that Hourihane was going to get himself sent off at some stage after that ridiculous tackle in the 2nd minute.

The first card should have been a straight red ... deliberate and petulant stamping. The Argyle disciplinary record continues to match the football of the last few years. Get rid of Fletcher. We need new hearts... this bunch are going nowhere.

Andy_Symons wrote:

It was a very poor decision by the Ref, but, on reflection, Hourihane was a grade-A pillock for putting the Ref into a position where he could make such a bad decision.

No. The ref was 100% right. The rules of the game are explicit and clear.

Even without hourihane they weren't worth watching on the local Rec.

when you go fletcher, take hourihane with you.

And the fireman

At the end of the day he decided to blank the ref after already being rightly booked a few minutes earlier. He's a tw@t and I hope his weeks wages goes straight to the staff fund.

The pundits on the tellybox said that a ticking off would have sufficed, I have seen many a free kick being re taken then the ref showing the player his whistle not the yellow card. The trouble is that this gives the apologists a good argument, this was undoubtably a turning point in the game but we should at least have held out for the re play. We were out thought, out played, out classed again by another non league side. Poor, end of.

He is a liability for the team

He has been reading from the simon walton book of how to make things 10x harder for your team mates to do their job!

My view is that he was lucky to stay on after the stamping/tackle he got booked for after 2 minutes. Yup 2 minutes and he's walking a tightrope on a pitch which was greasy and slippery.

The second yellow was correct to the letter of the law but that's where a decent referee would've just warned him. If anything it was Lennox I think who ran and dummied. This meant either Hourihane had to wait and ask the ref if it was ok to take it still, if he could it was hardly going to have fooled the defence, and if the ref said no then it had given away the dummy run.

There was no need to book him at all, but regardless of whether Hourihane stayed on the pitch or not, and I reckon it wouldn't have been too much longer before he picked up another booking anyway, we were total and utter shite and a feckin embarrassment.

The Argyle twitter feed have made a couple of comments like "Well done to Dorchester and good luck in the 2nd round, you won't get another ref like today"
and "This will go down as a famous Dorchester win. It won't mention the part played by an infamous refeering decision"

Just feckin congratulate the part-timer's who made us look like a team of hairdressers who didn't want to ruin their fake tans and highlighted mullets.

Not once in the whole match did I think that we played this passing football everyone keeps banging on about. Not once did I think that any Dorchester players looked inferior to ours.

Hourihane might have been an idiot again, but I honestly doubt it would've made any difference today.

Now we've got 4 games in a row with teams that have had an impressive start to the season. Burton on Wednesday followed by the best team in the league by far, Gillingham, and then 2 away games against clubs in the top 5.

We really could be in a relegation fight again.

I thought that some of the passing around the left of defence and into the midfield was quite good, the trouble was we couldn't pass it to the forwards. The main problem is that our best player and goal scorer in Madjo didnt get a chance to play, says it all for me as well, we were missing a loanee striker that Aldershot don't even want.