Crystal Palace gave Manchester City a scare, but were helpless as the Blues came from two goals down to win 4-2.
Crystal Palace chairman Steve Parish has slammed the officials for missing ‘two big decisions’ that went against his side in their Premier League defeat to Manchester City on Saturday.
After taking a two-goal lead against City, Palace thought they had a third goal as Jordan Ayew had the ball in the back of the net. However, the referee had already blown his whistle as the chance came from Odsonne Eduoard blocking Ederson’s attempts to roll the ball out to a teammate.
Also in the first half, Erling Haaland escaped without any punishment for a high boot on defender Joachim Andersen, with the striker’s studs catching Andersen on the side of the head as he stopped for a header.
After the game, Palace manager Patrick Vieira did not want to be drawn on the two incidents, accepting that the referee had a better view of them than he did, but his chairman Parish had a different outlook as he took to Twitter to complain about the decisions.
Re-tweeting a video of the Ayew ‘goal’, Parish wrote: “Fair enough [Man City] played very well today in the second half and congrats to them, but two big decisions went against us today – It’s very difficult to understand how this was disallowed – the ball has clearly left the keepers hand in the direction he wanted it to.”
He then shared post of a screengrab of Haaland’s high boot on Andersen, which was being compared with Sadio Mane’s red card vs Ederson at the Etihad in 2017 when he jumped to reach a ball and took out the goalkeeper with a reckless high boot.
“This is the second one – not even a yellow,” he wrote, with a shrugging emoji. “No VAR check as far as was communicated.”
However, manager Vieira was asked about both incidents after the game, where he said about Ayew’s disallowed goal: “I haven’t seen it again, it’s difficult to comment. We didn’t see it.”
On the Haaland incident, he said: “I don’t know. I don’t want to talk too much about that. The referee made a decision and we have to move on.”
