Styles Spoils Perfectly Good Game

Manchester United 2 - Bolton 0
Scorers
Manchester United: Ronaldo (pen 60), Rooney (77)

Team: Van der Sar, Rio, Vidic, Evra, Neville, Fletcher, Anderson (Scholes 71), Park, Ronaldo (Nani 81), Babertov, Tevez (Rooney 71)

We beat our favourite whipping boy for the past few seasons but the mood was somewhat spoilt by the worst referee in the EPL.

For a huge portion of the game, we were left frustrated, firing blanks in front of goal. Bolton had come with a game plan and it was to park the entire bus in front of the goal. Our ridiculously expensive strikeforce on show did very little to justify their pricetag. The only threat came from the one-man demolition crew, Ronaldo. He was probably the only person actually taking on the responsibility of taking shots, but Jaaskelainen was simply a man mountain today.

That's not to say we didn't play hard. We played extremely hard, but just couldn't find a way past 11 men in the penalty box. But you knew that it was just a matter of time before we find the back of the net.

Rob Styles decided to make amends for his past transgressions against us and awarded us a supremely weak penalty when Ronaldo was brought down in the box. No, actually it didn't even look like a penalty no matter how many times you look at it. And from the way we were playing, we didn't need that kind of help.

Anyway, Ronaldo made it one up for us. We probably deserved the lead at that point, but the occasion had a sour feel to it.

At least the second was a thing of beauty. Ronaldo laid the ball to Rooney and he fired it in from an acute angle giving us a comfortable cushion. There probably could have been more had we been more prolific, but I think at the end of the day it was a fair result. Bolton would probably have been hard done by had it been more.

The FA needs to really do something about the piss poor quality of refereeing in the English game. The phantom goal last week between Watford and Reading should have been a wake up call for them. Oh, and they should never let Styles referee another top-flight game again. He's utterly useless.