Losers
Steve Bennett
2007/08 will be remembered as Cristiano Ronaldo's season. But if the match at Wigan is recalled, it will be for the appalling work of Steve Bennett. Make no mistake, his mistakes were uncomfortably critical to the final-day outcome. Would United have won the championship without them? Debatable. Certainly it is inconceivable that Chelsea would have decelerated to walking pace in the final ten minutes had the game at JJB not been effectively over, enabling Bolton to snatch their injury-time equaliser.
Perhaps United would have recovered from the concession of a penalty had Rio Ferdinand been penalised for leaning into Jason Koumas' shot and deflecting the ball away with the top of his arm. But it would have been difficult. And the second half would have been difficult in the extreme were the leaders at a numerical disadvantage.
The decision not to penalise Ferdinand was a judgement call. Yet having judged Scholes to have deliberately impeded Marcus Bent with a straight-arm block, Bennett's decision was made. A yellow card, Scholes' second after earlier committing a typically horrendous tackle, was mandatory. He had to go. He didn't.
"You should ask the referee about his integrity," complained Steve Bruce. "Had it been any other day it was another yellow card and he should have been off" - which is the polite way of saying exactly what Andy Gray said in commentary: Bennett bottled it.
The point will be made, with tedious regularity, that Scholes should have been awarded a penalty in the second half. This, it will be said, is evidence 'that these things even themselves out'. That, too, is a lie. The truth is that Scholes shouldn't have been awarded a penalty because he shouldn't have been on the pitch for the second half.
The incident damned Bennett in a further respect; far from being biased towards the champions, his refusal to point to the spot simply confirmed his mistakes were the product of straightforward incompetence.
