Liverpool beat Nottingham Forest in controversial circumstances at the weekend.
The Reds scored a goal that seemed to come from a refereeing mistake as what should have been a Nottingham Forest drop ball was actually given back to Liverpool.
As you can imagine, this incident caused all sorts of controversy, and after the game, Forest fans, players and even the owner were up in arms.
Michail Antonio has now given his verdict on this incident when speaking on the Footballer’s Football Podcast, and he says that Luis Diaz’s part in this incident was actually genius, noting that Diaz kicked the ball back to Caoimhin Kelleher in the midst of the chaos, claiming that this confused the referee and allowed Liverpool to restart with possession.
Luis Diaz’s genius move
Antonio spoke about the £37m man’s actions.
“I do rate, I rate Diaz because that passback got them the ball. He kicked it back to the keeper which is genius. That confused the referee, and he’s seen that it’s back at the keeper and he’s said alright it’s Liverpool’s. There are four other officials and someone needs to say that’s a Forest ball,” Antonio said.
Did he mean it?
It has to be said if Diaz did mean to confuse the referee and retain possession for Liverpool, this was a very clever move.
However, we have to question how much intent there was behind this.
Diaz is a very clever player, but this isn’t something that would often come to mind for a Premier League footballer in this situation.
Perhaps Diaz did mean it, and if he did, we can only take our hats off to him, but, in our view, this just looks like a bit of an innocuous mistake that wasn’t spotted by the referee and Diaz just did what came natural to him in the moment rather than purposefully plotting to gain an advantage.
