Former Premier League midfielder Don Hutchison has hit back at ex England international Trevor Sinclair for his dig at Liverpool forward Sadio Mane.
The Senegal international went down under a challenge from Leicester City man Marc Albrighton to earn a controversial penalty at the death in the Reds’ 2-1 win over Leicester City on Saturday. After Sinclair said: “Thought Mane was better than that”, BBC pundit Hutchison responded.
“Albrighton naively caught his ankle,” he wrote on his personal Twitter account. “Defo pen and a great call even in real time from Chris Kavanagh.
“VVD [Virgil van Dijk] [Dejan] LOVREN Fabinho [James] Milner and Mane all outstanding today.”
https://twitter.com/donhutch4/status/1180577018183704578
OPINION
There’s no doubt that Mane went down easily against the Foxes, but that’s not the debate here. Ultimately Albrighton did make contact with the former Southampton man’s ankle in the box and, because Mane was trying to twist away at the time, it was enough for him to go down. Again, he made the most of it. However, there was contact and it was a foul, however minimal. Albrighton has to be doing better in the penalty area at that late point in the game. Hutchison describing him as naive is absolutely spot on. This is going to be an incident that garners plenty of debate, and no wonder. It was the sort of decision from the referee on which title challenges swing. Ultimately Liverpool kept on pushing and kept on getting into the box and they got their reward for it. Mane may have milked some contact to get the penalty, but there WAS contact. That’s the important thing, here. If there was no contact then it wouldn’t have been a penalty, but there was and so it was.
