Premier Refs, you're having a laugh

If Portsmouth fans didn't know it already, today they finally had it drilled home. Matt Messias is one of the most incompetent referees in the whole league.

It's not just the fact he managed to book nine players in a game with perhaps two bad tackles. It's not just the fact that his lack of common sense allowed the game to threaten to boil over at one point. It's not just the fact that every single niggle ended with an inevitable trip to his pocket where, toaster-like, a yellow card would surely be waiting to spring up into his waiting palm so he could happily flash it about like a child with a new toy.

Oops! I did it again

Unfortunately it goes back much further than just today. Like when we drew 1-1 with Manchester City last season and, in a relatively clean game, there were still five yellows. What's more their equaliser in the dying seconds came from an incorrectly given free-kick. Referee, Matt Messias. Or how about last season when we beat Liverpool in the cup; a game that saw a penalty given for a handball by Primus only for the referee to realise it was actually Baros (it's not as if they've got different skin colour or anything remotely obvious), as well as awarding another penalty for one of the best tackles you're ever likely to see. Referee? Matt Messias. How about when we beat Grimsby 1-0 to go top of the table, what seems like decades ago? A game that saw seven yellow cards and a shocking absence of common sense? Or when we drew 1-1 at Brighton and had perhaps the most stonewall penalty of all time turned down? Can you GUESS who the referee was?

Whilst I don't want my post-match musings to be completely dominated by the performance of Mr Messias, I can't help but politely state my belief that the man is a complete and utter idiot with no understanding of the game and the sooner he is retired to non-league the better. When someone puts in a tackle less than ten minutes into the game which just about makes contact, you do NOT book them. Especially if it's their first tackle of the game and, what's more, not that bad. Because if you do book them you then have to book every other little challenge for the rest of the game, therefore ending up with a ridiculous card count.

Oh look! That's what happened!

Right, I've got the anger out of my system now and I can move on to the match itself. If someone had offered us a point against Newcastle I think we all would've taken it; to come back from a goal down was encouraging and especially not to lose was the most important bit. There's still a feeling of nagging disappointment though that, despite their eight successive wins, Newcastle were there for the taking. Unfortunately our new defensive way of play doesn't allow us to charge at teams in the last five minutes like we used to, now we're playing for every point to make sure we don't throw it away.

And I suppose there's nothing wrong with that. If we had completely committed ourselves to the win and got too many men forward, with their pace and skill they could easily have caught us on the break and we'd have ended up with no points. Even so there's something slightly disappointing about us taking off an attacking midfielder for a defensive counterpart with ten minutes to go at home, only for them to take off a defender for Patrick Kluivert with five minutes to go; certainly making their attacking intentions clear. Still I suppose "defensive" and "cautious" are the two buzz words around Fratton Park for the rest of this season at least and we're just going to have to deal with it.

Yak breaks a sweat

And so to individual performances. Yakubu was - god forbid - actually seen running a couple of times today and had a couple of efforts too, but he still isn't turning in the performances we know he can. He still spent a lot of time standing around and watching the match go on around him, occasionally flicking his foot at the ball at random in the hope something might happen. The last couple of months of his Portsmouth career are going to be like watching an animal slowly dying, I can tell. Meanwhile, Steve Stone was probably man of the match and put in bags of effort as well as getting his second goal against Newcastle this season, although allegedly offside at the time. LuaLua was keen and full of running but so bloody frustrating, still I guess that's the marvel of the man - you never know what he's going to do next. The defence deserve a pat on the back because despite being up against the likes of Shearer, Kluivert and Dyer over the course of the ninety minutes, you'd have barely known it. Stefanovic in particular had a good game despite getting clattered at one point.

The midfield pairing, unfortunately for them, didn't do all that well. Cissé's touch seemed to desert him far too often whilst Skopelitis had his worst game so far in a blue shirt as a lot of the time he seemed to be chasing shadows and giving the ball away too easily. I feel for him to be honest as at United and Arsenal he did quite well but for the majority of fans who only go to home games, they're going to start forming a - probably false - opinion on him as a waste of money. Hopefully the fans will still give him time but our recent record on giving players time to develop isn't good - witness the likes of Chalkias and Griffin who both ended up getting abuse in the early stages of their Fratton Park careers.

All in all not our best performance of the season by a long stretch of the imagination and the game itself certainly wasn't the best. But we got a point and it takes us one position up in the table, as well as seven points away from the drop. We played some decent stuff at times and matched a team on form; we're not creating many chances but we've still scored a goal. Not only that, but we did look fairly miserly at the back too. Hopefully it goes some way to rebuilding a bit of confidence before the massively enormous super-dooper game against Fulham in a couple of weeks.