Angry birds

Seagulls in a flap

Paul Buckle and Guy Branston were angry men after seeing Guillem Bauza equalize in injury time on Friday to make the score 2-2 between Northampton Town and Torquay United.

After the game Torquay manager Buckle and defender Branston laid into referee Chris Sarginson, regarding his handling of the game and in particular his decision to give the Cobblers a 95th minute free kick for an off the ball tussle, which resulted in Bauza’s net-busting volley.

Buckle tried his best to be guarded with his criticism of the referee but still let slip that he thought that Torquay had been “robbed” of three points, that Sarginson flagged “for a nothing decision late in the game” and that Northampton’s goals were a “complete opposite” of the Gulls’ because “we deserved our goals”. “You have to commend the fans here, they get right behind their team and right on top of the referee and I said to the officials at half time, don’t let them influence you, but they did”.

Scathing stuff indeed but heavyweight defender Guy Branston went even further by decrying both the referee and Northampton as a club. Giving the kind of interview that local journalists dream of, Branston first attacked the approach of Northampton’s gifted Spaniard Guillem Bauza.

“The referee gave a lot of decisions their way,” snapped Branston. “I was booked for blocking a Spanish player, and a very very good player… but he cheated most of the night, diving around, making a meal of things. The referee was very much Northampton. We can’t have that in this division, it is disappointing”.

“He gave them a free kick just outside the area at the end, he is trying to give them a penalty for a handball. He is going along with whatever the crowd are doing”.

critique

Not stopping there, Branston continued with his critique of the referee in relation to the last gasp free kick decision, claiming that “Robbo (Robertson) said to me that Harrad had elbowed him, so he has moved Harrad out of the way and Harrad had gone down. If that’s true, Harrad has sucked him in. But why doesn’t the linesman see the elbow when he sees the shove?”

Branston then turned on the Cobblers crowd saying that they “made a meal of everything that went on and that is what Northampton does… they are very bitter and twisted, they sit there and moan and moan and moan about every decision. They think the world is against us because we are Northampton Town but let’s not forget we are lowly lowly Torquay and were batting well above our weight”

Continuing, Branston said “we’ve come on Friday and played against lads who are on £2500 per week and knocked them off the park physically and mentally. They can’t moan at us for coming here, sticking the boot in and getting into them because once Gary Johnson gets his team, that’s all they will be doing”.

Branston’s latter comments that Torquay “knocked” Northampton “off the park both physically and mentally” and that they couldn’t be blamed for “sticking the boot in and getting into” the Cobblers were particularly confusing considering he had a couple of minutes previously attacked the referee for favouring the home side and their “cheat” players who had “dived around”. He also failed to mention whether all of Torquay’ eleven fouls and four yellow cards on the night were down to referee error. Nor after having only 46% of possession why they had felt “robbed”?

Moreover, the Torquay two failed to spend much time talking about the fact that their team bus was half an hour late for the match meaning that they had changed on the team coach and had arrived in an unprofessional state for an important match.

Finally and somewhat unsurprisingly, when summing up their thoughts on the game and trying to explain their extreme frustration with proceedings neither Paul Buckle nor Guy Branston mentioned that they had both been on the books of Northampton Town previously and had both been promptly released after being deemed not good enough for first team football.

Funny that.