Hands Around My Throat

A pretty good performance yesterday, no real worries throughout the entire game, just one chance for them in the dying moments, safe as houses.  Of course all the papers tell us just how stupid Ronaldo was, how it was the most obvious sending off ever, etc., etc..  This completely ignores the facts, obviously.
I'm not going to deny that it was a bit of a strange thing to do, handling the ball like that, but a yellow card?  The Telegraph report at least manages some humour from it, rather than the pofacedness of the other papers:

Cristiano Ronaldo is clearly so determined to get his hands on the Ballon
d'Or, the traditional prize awarded to the European Footballer of the Year,
that he is now actively grabbing any spherical object that comes his way,
regardless of the consequences.

Bizarrely it is The Mail which, between the lines, gives the truth about the situation - this report tells us that Howard Webb changed his mind:

After initially seeming content to only award a free-kick, Webb sent off the distraught Portugal winger

While Graham Poll, while nowhere following this thought to its logical conclusion, tells us when a referee should book someone for a deliberate handball:

handball is not a mandatory caution.

The player must be seen
to be either breaking up a promising forward attack or trying to gain
an advantage with his deliberate act.

So Ronaldo shouldn't have been booked.  Simple as that.

So tell me how The Mail's actual match report says this:

Booked correctly for a late tackle on Shaun Wright-Phillips and
rightly again for a peculiar handball at a corner, the 23-year-old
fully deserved the red card issued by referee Howard Webb.

On the whole, the official enjoyed an almost faultless afternoon.

Even the first booking was a far too harsh, ijn fact I thought Howard Webb had, maybe not quite a shocker, but he certainly was over fussy and eager to book players.

The most outrageous report of the day is in The Independent though, read this:

But his dismissal, for an unfathomable two-handed volleyball punt in
the six-yard box, is the latest in a series of theatrics which are
raising serious questions about his mind for the title-retaining job in
hand – and about his manager's latest claims about his greatness. There
has always been something incendiary about Ronaldo – witness his
straight red in the January 2006 derby match for a lunge at Andy Cole –
but never such a continuous state of distraction.

So incendiary is he that we have to go back to 2006 for an example - the other sending off was nothing as well, and how "incendiary" it is to handle a football I really don't know.  Where's the sense of perspective here?

Then read this:

Before all that, a moment's consideration for a real football story,
because it screams out hypocrisy. Shaun Wright-Phillips, the best man
on the field in the 151st Manchester derby, was hacked in a way which
did for his free-flowing threat and saw no fewer than four United
players – Darren Fletcher, Patrice Evra, Michael Carrick and Ronaldo –
booked for fouls on him. The Blackburn manager, Mark Hughes, was
diplomatic. "Shaun was the attacking threat for us and I would suggest
that United felt [that] and fouled him in possession," he said.
Ferguson, who gave us that baton imagery, would have been fulminating
had Ronaldo received the same.

What?  Strong refereeing to stop it was what Sir Alex was asking for and he congratulated the referee after the Villerreal game for the use of the card and the way he handled the fouling on Ronaldo.  Our players were booked (though as far as I'm concerned the word "hack" is overstrong here) so where's the hypocrisy?  Oh.  It's in The Independent.

And now this:

the winger's malevolent side was on show. Ronaldo should have been
dismissed before the hour when, having hacked at Wright-Phillips and
been booked by Howard Webb, he looked the referee in the eye and
offered ironic applause. Ronaldo was spared, only to leave after
raising his hands after climbing towards a corner Rooney lofted over
nine minutes later.

First he's "incendiary", now he's "malevolent".  The booking was very harsh and while his handclapping was perhaps ill-advised, to suggest he should, rather than could, have been sent off seems ridiculous.
I would check through my archive but I don't have time, but from memory Ian Herbert has a history of this hatred of us, maybe he should go and watch a team he could bring himself to enjoy watching...