The Harriers dragged a draw from the jaws of a terrible defeat, and some terrible refereeing, at Forest Green tonight when nine men got the better of the cheating Andrew Mangan when he dived to the floor after tapping Martin Riley's ankle and getting the young defender sent off.
Earlier the same fate had befallen Justin Richards when the former Harrier Lee Ayres took him out near the corner flag in a two footed tackle that almost broke the star strikers legs. Stupidly Justin got up and retaliated by sticking his head in Ayres face and getting an instant red card. The referee - the wonderfully and aptly named Mr Coote - simply handed Ayres a yellow card for a tackle that earned Stevenage's Danny Murphy a red card last Saturday.
How can anyone; player, manager or fan 'Respect the Ref' when brain dead idiots like Coote are placed in charge of a game of professional football. Even parks football is too good for such an inferior referee as him.
The game started off alright with Martin Brittain added to the starting line up in place of Darryl Knights. For the first twenty minutes of the game it was all Harriers and, although we were making hard work of it, it was only going to be a matter of time before we scored.
We'd already had one early chance go begging from Chris McPhee but when Matt Barnes-Homer broke through into the area and selflessly passed the ball back to Martin Brittain then Brit wasn't going to miss such a chance as that and sent the ball arrow like into the back of the net for the deserved opening goal.
We should have been two goals to the good but a perfectly good goal following a fair challenge by Barnes-Homer on a Forest defender was ruled out by the Coote.
Ten minutes later though Forest Green had drawn level after a ball was played over the top of the out of position Lee Baker for Mangan to run onto. He got into the area and despite getting robbed of the ball by Martin Riley he managed to reach it and push it over to the clearly offside Conal Platt who poked the ball home for the equaliser.
Just after that controversial goal came more controversy when the Richards/Ayres incident occurred.
Justin had run onto a ball played forward towards the corner flag by Brittain and just as he turned to cross it over Ayres came crashing through into him from a full five yards away and sent Richards flying into the air. Stupidly Richards didn't think it through and realise that a sane referee would send Ayres off for the tackle and instead got up and put his head into Ayres' face.
Ayres dropped like a Mangan even though it was unlikely there had been any real contact and so Richards had to walk. So should have Ayres but Coote obviously didn't know what he was doing and just booked him instead.
The incident incensed Mark Yates so much that he was warned by the Officials about his understandable anger at the poor refereeing.
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Chris McPhee
