This is exactly what the best full forward in the country wants to be doing.
Conor McManus wants to be rolling around the ground.
He wants to be wrestling with monsters.
Immediately after he kicks a wide, he wants to goad the defenders and start a shoving match with two of them at the one time.
Conor Lane has seen his type before.
Despite a piece two and a half years ago directly calling for referees to get their acts together and f**king wise up with their ‘two yellow cards’ trick for incidents when forwards are being pulled and dragged off the ball, Conor Lane in good faith used his discretion and caught on to what was really going on in Healy Park on Sunday.
He’s not fooled by McManus, the exciting scorer with serene temperament. He knows that any chance the Monaghan man gets, he’s going to use his shirt to attack Che Cullen’s fingers and then he’ll bounce around the ground to intimidate the full back even further.
What choice did the referee have but to warrant a yellow card for Conor McManus and his actions?
Yellow card for McManus pic.twitter.com/3NkLzivMN4
— Conán Doherty (@ConanDoherty) June 5, 2018
After consultation with the linesman, Lane sternly called McManus to attention and hit both the Fermanagh and Monaghan player with the same punishment.
Whereas less-enlightened students of the game might look at two yellow cards and summise that a referee, along with his officials, are basically admitting with that decision that they either didn’t see what happened or they didn’t give a bollocks about what happened or they didn’t understand what would happen in that situation, in real life, it’s obvious now that corner forwards and, more pertinently, Conor McManus, have been pulling the wool over all our eyes this whole time.
Why would they want to attack when they could be rolling around off the ball?
Why wouldn’t they rub it in to their markers when they hit a wide unchallenged?
For too long, this type of player has been getting away with distracting defenders.
We should just be thankful that Conor Lane had the good grace to highlight this carry on again and to clamp down on it fairly.
More yellow cards for forwards being dragged around please. God knows they deserve it.
