Furious Allardyce Blames Referee Marriner

Funny, I thought Allardyce set up to draw the game, so it seems a bit rich for him to be pointing the finger at referee Andre Marriner for our failure to score and take home 3 points. Listen to Doctor Evil and you would think we were somehow robbed. And the reason? Because Schneiderlin wasn't sent off when he scythed through Diame.

Now I always consider it a tad desperate when a manager uses the excuse for the failure to get a result that the opposition had the same number of players on the pitch. But in this case, I think Allardyce may have a point, even though O'Brien might have seen red for a similar tackle. After all, by selecting Maiga to start, Allardyce handed a one man advantage to Southampton, so had Marriner sent off Schneiderlin, he would  simply have been levelling things up by making it ten men against ten!

For the record, here's what Doctor Evil had to say after the game:

"I can't for the life of me understand Andre Marriner. He is such an experienced referee now, how he didn't see that."

"For me that was a disappointment. It's in the end kept them with 11 men on the field, which the law was supposed to be they should only have had 10 men, which would have given us a better chance of winning because I started the game with 10 anyway."

"But I'm happy with a point. I can't affect what the referees do, it's not my job, it's just my job to build a squad that can cope with injuries and to evolve tactics which enable us to score when the opposition have eleven men on the pitch in case the referee doesn't send one of them off."

"Of course I did my job brilliantly, as ever, because we could have won it at the end when that Ginger twat had his chance but he let me down just like he let the people of Wales down in mid week - that was the best chance of game".

"It was a bit unlucky for me and my superb tactics that it fell to our centre half, but from that far out even a Welsh ginger twat should hit the target."

"Overall, it was a decent performance. Defensively we showed how good we are but we can't hit the back of the net. That's my concern at the moment. But had Marriner done his job and reduced them to ten men, we might have had half a chance of winning."