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There were several people that didn't come out of this Premier League weekend particularly well, and high up on that list is Manchester City's Edin Dzeko.
In the first instance the Bosnian was unlucky as frankly he was fouled by Daniel Agger when the two came together near the half-way line but nothing was given. What was unacceptable was lying on the floor and feigning an injury he clearly didn't have. Liverpool played on and seconds later Daniel Sturridge smashed in a great goal.
If I was Dzeko's manager or team-mate, or a supporter for that matter, I'd be furious. Not at Liverpool for failing to stop but with Dzeko himself for letting his team down. Okay, so he was fouled and nothing was given. That's a shame, but it will happen again and again in football. What you do is dust yourself down and try to help your mates out, not roll around wallowing in fake pain and real self-pity.
Liverpool did absolutely the right thing. The players aren't in charge of the game. They need to play until they are told otherwise. I obviously can't fully praise the referee, Anthony Taylor, because he missed the initial foul, but once you take that out of the equation he acted correctly in allowing play to continue. You are instructed as a referee to stop play in order to seek immediate attention for a head or neck injury, and for something you deem serious, such as a broken leg. After the light initial challenge, there was clearly nothing wrong with Dzeko, and Mr Taylor recognised this.
Unabashed, Dzeko got to his feet and fired a volley of abuse at the officials too. He was cautioned and can consider himself lucky. I hope he is thoroughly ashamed of himself, and I hope within the club he was told how poorly he acted.
Mr Taylor did very well, later in the game, to react to a poor piece of sportsmanship by a Liverpool player. Sturridge got beyond Joleon Lescott and then hurled himself to the floor. The tell-tale sign of the dive was the extra step Sturridge took before planting himself on the deck. Mr Taylor was not fooled and, after an initial protest, Sturridge accepted his punishment.
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If I was a manager, Goran Popov would never play for me again. Spitting at a fellow player, a fellow human being, is the lowest of the low. Credit to Steve Clarke for not using the 'I didn't see it' defence and condemning his player - another that let his side down.
Credit also to Mark Clattenburg, not only for seeing it, but for acting very quickly. Kyle Walker did not act violently, but he might have done. Mr Clattenburg raised the red card swiftly and removed Popov without delay.
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I had sympathy for Rafa Benitez when he expressed his annoyance after the incident involving Demba Ba and Fabricio Coloccini, although I wasn't in total agreement with the Chelsea boss. Benitez suggested that Coloccini's challenge should have resulted in a Chelsea penalty and a red card for the Newcastle defender. I'm with him 50%.
Coloccini, to put it bluntly, kicked Ba in the face. The ball had already gone, the challenge was late, there was definite contact. To me it had to be a penalty. It doesn't matter that the ball was going wide from Ba's header. For one thing, the ball was still in play when the contact came, and secondly you could argue that the illegal challenge did plenty to put Ba off of his header.
I don't, though, believe that it warranted a red card. It was not deliberate by Coloccini. He was making a genuine attempt to prevent the chance but he did make contact very dangerously and very high. I would deem it 'reckless' and would feel it was worthy of a yellow card, not a red.
I would not advocate a red card for denial of a goalscoring opportunity, either, because by definition he did not deny one. He might have made one more difficult, but there isn't a category for that.
There was a similar case, in some ways, during Reading v Sunderland. As Sebastian Larsson was firing a shot towards the Reading goal, defender Ian Harte swept his legs from underneath him. Similarly to the Ba incident, although the shot was already made, you still can't clean people out after the fact, and you can very well argue that Larsson was distracted by the unfair challenge as the shot was taken.
Notably, it wasn't very long until another incident occurred in the same box, and on this occasion I think referee Lee Mason made a very good decision in awarding Sunderland a spot-kick. Pavel Pogrebnyak caught John O'Shea with a loose tackle, but O'Shea was quickly back up and the ball with a Sunderland player. It might have been easy for the referee to ignore the tackle and let play go, but he was right to stop and give a penalty.
Rob McNichol - follow him on Twitter
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