Pompey Conned

You go away from home, you play well and you have more possession, more corners and more attempts at goal than the home side – then you lose 2-1.

To make matters worse, you know you should have won that game. It’s bad enough to gift the opposition a goal inside the very first minute, especially when your normally reliable goalkeeper spills a relatively easy header and your right back spurns the opportunity to clear, allowing the midfield player in white to slide the ball in. But to lose to a goal from a penalty that should never have been awarded, to lose to a piece of cheating, that’s really difficult to take.

Harry Redknapp and his team, and the loyal Pompey fans, won’t forget Didier Zokora in a hurry, because in the 34th minute of the game at White Hart Lane he conned the referee with a blatant dive despite the fact that Pedro Mendes did not touch him, and by so doing he won the game for Tottenham.

But it was a hollow, spurious victory. The television monitors immediately exposed the dishonesty of Zokora’s unscrupulous ploy and referee Chris Foy acknowledged as much when he apologised to Harry Redknapp for his mistake. He had been conned and he knew it, but when in the post-match interviews Spurs boss Martin Jol insisted that Zokora didn’t mean it, nobody was likely to be fooled.

One piece of dishonesty is more than enough.