Everton forward Jack Grealish criticised referee Darren England after Liverpool edged the Merseyside derby 2\u20131 on Saturday lunchtime, arguing the official had been influenced by the Anfield atmosphere.<\/p>\n
Everton had offered little until the second half but reduced the deficit when Idrissa Gana Gueye halved the lead on 58 minutes with a thumping strike, setting up a tense finish. Grealish, the Manchester City loanee, objected to two interventions that stopped Everton taking quick free kicks and to the booking of Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall after the second incident.<\/p>\n
“They were obviously trying to slow the game down at times, I\u2019ve never seen a player in my whole life get booked for taking a quick free kick,” Grealish fumed postgame. “I don\u2019t know where that rule has come in. Even the stoppage time, three minutes and one minute\u2014I\u2019ve never seen that in the Premier League in the last two or three years.<\/p>\n
“There were frustrations with the referee. Sometimes you want to let the game go, I completely get that, but you can\u2019t not give us something and then two seconds later one of their defenders goes down after getting touched in the back and he gives it.<\/p>\n
“You can\u2019t do that. You come to these stadiums and the crowd are on them, I feel that they [the referees] feel they have to give it. Kiernan is on four yellows now, and he got one for taking a quick free kick. We want to get the game going, we\u2019re losing, and I\u2019ve never heard of that in my life.”<\/p>\n
The match marked Darren England’s first Merseyside derby and was only his second career appointment at Anfield. The 39-year-old official from Doncaster had previously drawn attention on a Merseyside visit when he issued two yellow cards to Gravenberch within eight second-half minutes during a 1\u20131 draw with Crystal Palace last May.<\/p>\n
Everton manager David Moyes shared his doubts about the stoppage time. “I think three minutes [of stoppage time] was very strange,” he lamented.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Grealish accused referee Darren England of being swayed by the Anfield crowd after 2\u20131 loss. Gueye. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2965,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[687,172],"tags":[1050,1057],"class_list":["post-2966","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-everton","category-epl","tag-derby-preview","tag-refereeing-controversy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2966","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2966"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2966\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2965"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2966"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2966"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2966"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}