A real sickener for Saddlers

Walsall Football Club was founded in 1888. The NHS came along 60 years later. Unfortunately Tuesday 20

March 2012 will not go down as a great day for either of these fine institutions, writes Saddlers blogger Mark Jones.

Now I'm not saying that either is perfect, nor am I saying that the situation for either is terminal but both WFC and our Health Service mean a hell of a lot, not just to me but to a lot of people I know. And I get really angry when I feel that they are being wronged, undermined or just plain cheated.

So listening to a debate on the controversial and unpopular Health and Social Care Bill on the way up to Hillsborough on Tuesday did nothing to put me in the mood for what was to happen to my team at around 9.40 pm that night.

Playing the Andrew Lansley role was referee Andy Haines. No doubt he'll only claim he was doing his job and that he was trying to be fair to everyone but you know that secretly he was only interested in looking out for the perceived 'big boys' (I refuse to use the term elite). He didn't care about doing the right thing, he didn't care about us.

The ref was no better. Throughout the game he made decisions in direct proportion to how much whinging and whining the home crowd did. Wendy player falls over, fans cry, ref gives a free kick. Jon Macken gets blatantly body checked centimetres away from the ref, no foul – it was all pretty standard stuff.

Of course he was aided and abetted in coalition with his two obligingly inept assistants, incapable of making a decision for themselves or doing the right thing. Alex Nicholls makes a run off the shoulder of the last man trying to go through on goal. Is he on or off? Well it doesn't really matter, because the lino's only going to do what the people behind him want.

Dave Grof makes a good save and scrambles to gather the rebound before it goes out for a corner. Is it over the line? Well the other lino has half a dozen players and two posts blocking his view, but he can make a decision straight away because the fans on the Kop have screamed for it.

Of course the Saddlers hadn't read the script, a top quality finish from Jonny Mac took some beating, but Jamie Paterson's sublime strike managed it and then some, and we played out the last 20 odd minutes with a 2-1 lead. However it was obvious that Andy didn't care, he wasn't about to settle for that.

My money was on a dubious penalty, my son suggested a sending-off but in the end it was the play-til-you score stoppage time that did for us. There's no doubt in my mind that had the Owls not equalised in the 95^th minute then we'd have just carried on until they did.

Normally I would shrug my shoulders and accept our lot, four decades of being a Saddler does that to you. I would be critical of our defending for both goals or rationalise that Sheff Wed had dominated the first half or that I'd have taken a point before kick-off; but on Tuesday something just snapped and it really got under my skin.

Maybe it was finding out that Gary Madine's ref-assisted strike had dropped us back into the bottom four. Maybe it was just the sense of injustice that seemed to epitomise the day. I'll get over it, let's just hope this latest relegation battle doesn't end up affecting my health.