The last game before this nonsense was written was the debacle against Man City which just went to show that the perception that refereeing errors even themselves up over the season is a pile of crap. Apparently on Soccer Saturday Phil Thompson could see no reason whatsoever for Mike the Skinny Little Rodent Riley to give a penalty. Neither could we, Phil, and even worse the view from every possible angle on Match of the Day confirmed everyone's view.

I don't like to blame referees for us losing points, but this season poor decisions by the man with the whistle have cost us big style and I reckon without those cock-ups we would be safe and looking forward, for the first time for many years, to meaningless end of season games without any tension or anxiety. I'm all for this call to show referees more respect, but for their part, if the refs want respect then they have got to earn it and stop making bloody awful decisions.

The City game also proved once and for all that Murph needs to be locked in a cage for three days before a match and fed on raw meat and prodded with a big stick every five minutes to make him angry. The lad has talent but he is six foot three and challenges like a big girl's blouse. He should be giving defenders nervous breakdowns by stomping all over them (in a fair way of course) but instead he allows himself to be intimidated in the tackle by players of lesser physical standing. Maybe he should be shown footage of the likes of Steve Kindon and the Welsh Git Leighton James who were similarly built to Murph, but who put themselves about to the point where the only way to stop them was to commit an act of grievous bodily harm upon their person, as illustrated so beautifully by our own Joe Bolton on one occasion at Burnley. I've defended Daryl against criticism from many people since he came into the side so please, mate, start getting nasty and fulfil your true potential and let's see you swop wings next season against Chelsea to cart Ashley Cole into the stands simply because he is a sneaky, cheating, disrespectful, money grabbing little shit.

Finally, our trip to Derby taught me and Jeanette an interesting lesson. We had one adult and one junior ticket so, being honest citizens we decided to get to Pride Park in time to upgrade the junior one. We considered lots of possible options which would mean we could get a pre-match slurp, but because Pride Park is at least a thousand miles from civilisation we ended up deciding to forego the beer and drive down in time to sort out the ticket and then just get into the ground. We dutifully got our route from the AA Route Planner, which suggested we’d get to Derby for about 1.15ish. Now the route we were given might have taken an hour and a half at 4am but it took us through all the Pottery towns of Stoke, Port Vale etc in the early afternoon on a Saturday. The roads were full of old dears on their way to Aldi to stock up on hair nets and dog food and parents taking their kids for their weekly treat of a McDonald’s, so we ended up parking up two minutes from the ground with five minutes to spare and a quick dash to the ticket office, which still saw us heading for our end with the game already kicked off.

After the match it took us half an hour just to get off the car park, so the moral of the story is that AA Route Planner is a marvellous and sexy little beast, but it does not take into account the time of day you're travelling or that people in Stoke and surrounding areas drive very slowly and very badly, or maybe the moral is that we should have had our pre-match gargle and tried to wing it on the junior ticket. Who's to know?

Dave Joyce