Gerard Deulofeu has made his long awaited return to football the same weekend Virgil van Dijk suffers a season ending knee injury. Absolutely beautiful timing. Justice served.
Would be rather more enjoyable if we were actually benefitting from that karma in any way. As it stands it's really just a reminder of how much that ****ed us. There are many factors, both short and longer term, that we can point to as contributing to our relegation, but in a very immediate way we can also look at the Deulofeu incident and say that if Van Dijk hadn't put him out for the season it's overwhelmingly likely, whatever else happened, that we would have stayed up.
You're probably right but it's hard to say. We were absolutely atrocious up until December with Geri in the team every week. We all benefit as the general public not having to witness those bin dippers win another league title.
Couldn't give a toss about Liverpool, other than absolutely despising City for a number of reasons, so I don't really care about van Dijk's unavailability one way or the other. I don't wish him any harm though, and hope he can recover soon. I will say as well that the Deulofeu incident was a lot more innocuous than the one with Pickford, that was an absolutely atrocious tackle and he's very lucky not to have been sent off for it
It was a totally unnecessary, cowardly push by Van Dijk and it was no coincidence that it came after Deulofeu had been causing them all kinds of problems in the first 15 minutes. Of course, it was brushed under the table because of the relative sizes of the two teams involved in a way that would never have happened if one of our hapless centre backs had got close enough to Salah to do it to him. As for their pompous request for an "official review" of VAR, try being a team that not once, but twice, had handball goals against them missed by dozy VAR refs.
3 or 4 times I think ! Was a bad incident but would have just been a red card and not penalty I think as offside had been given. Mane incident was tight but we have seen loads like that. They certainly weren’t the only team hard done by with VAR even this weekend. What else can be done now ? Same issues each week..
I agree that the Deulofeu incident was fairly innocuous. However, there's still this from Pool's CL winning season (18/19), which VVD only got a booking for:
Spot on. Van dik has got form for those snide tackles and it is fantastic to see him out with a horror injury. Hopefully its not a career ending injury, but one of those injuries where he comes back and is nowhere near the the player he used to be, but the club stands by him and keeps giving him chance after chance to prove he's still got it, but he never does and the club is hugely affected because of it. To the point of relegation and financial oblivion. Or 'doing a Chalobah' as its also known as.
