One team, full of pre-meditated antagonism, stretching the laws of decency to breaking point, while the other turned the other cheek.
One perplexed managed looked on passively, while his counterpart’s hate-ridden face frantically chewed gum to quell the bile inside.
The shellsuited personification that is Tony Pulis hurled more expletives at the fourth official as bottles of water on the turf.
He swore black was white, instructed every one of his gargantuan team to do likewise and verbally abused the fourth official more times than a Burslem wife beater on Stella.
Kind of makes a mockery of that spineless FA campaign don’t you think, when Stoke’s pre-planned hostility is fawned over by a gutless referee, who spat at our attempts at respect as if we were the criminals.
Foul on Crouch by Johnson. Presumably.
Let’s get one thing straight first off…
…Stoke City are infinitely better than us and boast the calibre of player that Mick McCarthy could barely recognise, let alone play.
But when a referee decides to widen the chasm in class by cheating, then football immediately stops being a game that I can ever associate with.
Anthony Taylor was the faceless friend of the school ground bully, lapping up every insult and profanity that Stoke City threw his way.
He cheated by not sending off Jonathan Woodgate for hacking down Jarvis a second time in the process of conceding a penalty (second bookable offence).
He then failed to spot a clear tackle by Roger Johnson on Jon Walters, deciding to reward fair play with a free kick to Stoke, from which they levelled.
Predictably, Stoke go on to win due to their superior ability at retaining possession and Tony Pulis can congratulate the men he had spent the last 90 minutes chastising.
That’s Premier League football folks.
This whole sub plot is inextricable to the game itself, so to quote Big Ron on a famous Monday Night Football interview: ‘If the boys play badly I’ll whip ‘em, but I ain’t whipping them for that.’
In short, we were great for 30 minutes and were by far the better team, going 1-0 up from the spot as Jarvis revelled in the absence of Andy Wilkinson.
While the referee clearly influenced the game by not sending off Woodgate, a secondary turning point was when Stephen Hunt ignored Steven Fletcher with the goal gaping before half time.
Whatever Mick said to his men at the break clearly didn’t work, as Stoke forced their way back into the game through the referee’s second clear moment of ineptitude.
But for all our gripes at the injustice of it all, we never made Sorensen save a single shot in the second half, looking completely dumbfounded at how to stem the red and white tide.
Stephen Ward, for all his vast improvement, was caught out for a second successive Saturday and with the ball firmly in our court to attack, we did nothing.
The threat of Jarvis was nullified when Pennant and Shotton doubled up on him, yet our secondary threat in Adam Hammill was once again ignored as we laboured to the final whistle.
Eleven defeats in 14 – featuring two feeble victories – tells us all we need to know about our side.
With peanuts to play with in January to strengthen it, maybe Mick would be better served calling up his good mate Pulis for a chat.
Knowing how to ‘win friends and influence people’ might earn us more points come May 13 than £4.5 million quid ever could.
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