If you pick up any newspaper today, listen to any Premier League-focused podcast, tune into sports-talk radio or trawl your social media network of choice you can’t help but be blasted by the message that ‘the new handball rule is RUINING the game’.
You’ll see words like ‘disgrace’, ‘farce’ and ‘nonsense’ banded about more than Sam Allardyce’s CV when there’s a Premier League managerial vacancy.
But, while we feel that the more goals we get the better, we had to act after the controversial decision that handed (excuse the pun) Newcastle a late, late point at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium on Sunday.
Our intervention came after Jose Mourinho’s Spurs outfit had bossed the entirety of the game, only to have a highly debatable penalty given against them in the sixth minute of added time. Big Andy Carroll got himself onto a long, raking free kick and headed the ball back across goal.
Unfortunately for Spurs, the ball hit the arm of Eric Dier, who had his back to Carroll and had no idea where the ball was as it hit him on the way back down from his jump. With the Premier League being forced by FIFA to fall into line with the rest of world football’s interpretation of the handball rule this season, VAR was forced to intervein and hand Steve Bruce’s men a scarcely believable opportunity to level the game.
Callum Wilson duly did the business and as Jose Mourinho was walking down the tunnel in disgust, we’d already sprang into action to discuss the matter with our bean counters and there was only one thing to do for our punters. You guessed it right, it was Justice Refund time.
It may have cost us a princely five-figure sum, but we decided to refund the stakes of punters who backed Tottenham to win as a free bet.
* Refund applied to all single bets on Tottenham to win in the Win-Draw-Win market. T&Cs apply.
It was only right, after all there was only so many times we could listen to Jamie Carragher call it a ‘disgrace’ before we had to do something about it.
Asked about the current uproar spokesman Paddy Power said: “It’s been a fairly quiet start to the season for refereeing controversies, but this weekend changed all that – with several mind-melting instances.
“I thought the Palace one was the worst ever, until I watched the Tottenham game, and we’ve still got two more games to go on Monday evening.”
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