FA to investigate Brendan Rodgers’ Claims of Officiating Bias
The Football Association is to investigate Liverpool manager Brendan Rodgers following his criticism of referee Lee Mason.
Rodgers called the performance of the match officials “horrendous” after his side’s 2-1 defeat by Manchester City.
He was angry that Raheem Sterling had a goal wrongly ruled out for offside and felt Luis Suarez was denied a late penalty during the Boxing Day match. Rodgers also questioned the appointment of Bolton referee Mason, saying,”I was surprised that we are playing in Manchester and we had a referee from Greater Manchester. Hopefully we won’t have a Greater Manchester referee with Liverpool-Manchester games in future. We had nothing that went our way at all.”
The FA must decide if rule E3 (1) has been breached. The rule legislates for comments made about a match official which imply bias, attack the officials’ integrity or which are personally offensive in nature. However, any FA action would be likely to happen next week.
Liverpool were top of the Premier League at the start of Boxing Day, but dropped to fourth and 3 points behind leaders, Arsenal after City’s comeback victory at the Etihad Stadium. Manuel Pellegrini’s side fought back from Philippe Coutinho’s opener to move within a point of leaders Arsenal after goals from Vincent Kompany and Alvaro Negredo.
