I see Mark Clattenburg has finally apologised (of sorts) for his biased, one-eyed, fawning performance in the Goodison derby 12 years ago that still rankles with Evertonians to this day. Here’s the article:
Mark Clattenburg has acknowledged he made two major mistakes that cost Everton in the ferocious 2007 Merseyside derby that he believes was one of the worst performances of his long career. The former referee’s name has long been anathema to Blues.
Liverpool won 2-1 at Goodison Park in an ill-tempered affair that saw the visitors awarded two penalties and both Tony Hibbert and Phil Neville sent off for the hosts.
Clattenburg is content with those calls but has now acknowledged he was wrong on two major points of contention — his failure to show Dirk Kuyt a red card for his lunge on Neville and to not award Everton a penalty in the final seconds when Jamie Carragher hauled down Joleon Lescott. He said those decisions have since haunted him.
“I lost control, I lost focus, I lost the ability to make decisions.”
He brought up the game when asked what fixture he would love to referee again in the hope of performing better.
He said: “I was only one year into my Premier League career and I was given the Manchester derby, the following week I was given the north London derby, and then the week after I was appointed to referee Everton vs Liverpool.
“And I’m not saying it as an excuse but I hadn’t experienced this type of derby before. I’ve just named two derbies that are totally different derbies. This was ferocious, this was a working-class derby [the type] that I had experienced as a fan, Newcastle United [Clattenburg is a Newcastle supporter] and Sunderland, but I hadn’t experienced as a referee. And I just got it completely wrong.”
Clattenburg stuck by his decisions to show straight red cards to Hibbert and Neville in both penalty incidents and made clear that, contrary to some claims at the time, then Liverpool captain Steven Gerrard did not cause him to upgrade Hibbert’s punishment from a yellow card.
He said: “Everton fans think that I’ve changed my mind because Steven Gerrard was walking past the camera when I’m changing the pockets… I’ve pulled out the wrong card and I’m thinking it’s not a yellow card, it’s a red card. It’s a denial of an obvious goal-scoring opportunity. But they think that Steven Gerrard said something which clearly never happened.
“It’s just because he was walking past the camera when I have changed the cards, but it was always a red card, which was [for] Tony Hibbert. And I sent off Phil Neville for a handball on the line.”
While Clattenburg held firm on those calls, he acknowledged errors elsewhere in the match.
He said: “The big mistake was there was a challenge by Dirk Kuyt where he goes airborne.
“He doesn’t make contact, but he jumps into a challenge. So when you watch the still and you watch the video back, you go, how is he not sent off?
“And I took advice from the assistant referee who was very experienced and who I probably thought I should rely on because he had more seniority. He was more experienced than I was. He’d officiated in these derbies many, many times. I hadn’t. And I took his advice. He’d said a yellow card and I’d give a yellow card, which was a mistake, a mistake in Everton’s eyes.
“But the worst mistake was near the end of the game. As the ball gets played in, I don’t see anything, I don’t see one thing.
“I don’t know if I’m just mentally fatigued or what was going on in my mind but Jamie Carragher has pulled down Joleon Lescott for an easy penalty.
“We talk about football understanding, if I had given this penalty and Everton had the chance to equalise, I would have got some criticism in the game but I wouldn’t have got the huge criticism that I received.
“Because by not awarding that penalty, in Everton’s eyes, correctly… all the big decisions seemed to go against Everton and everything went in favour of Liverpool.”
Clattenburg, who oversaw almost 300 Premier League games and reffed the finals of both the Champions League and Euros in 2016, said it was years before he was involved in another Blues game and that, while he believed some of the criticism that followed went too far, he accepted the magnitude of his mistakes made a backlash inevitable.