IT would appear that there’s more chance of dust settling in the Kalahari Desert than over the Merseyside derby last weekend.

For a game that produced little football of quality, it generated enough talking points to have a flock of parrots reaching for the Fisherman’s Friends. Most of course centred around the, er, interesting decisions of referee Mark Clattenberg, though the substitution of Steven Gerrard also threatened to assume the proportions of an international incident. So move over Polly, I’m going to have my say.

Clattenberg’s banishment to the private hell occupied for a while by Rob Styles was inevitable after his poor handling of the game.

Jamie Carragher’s passable impression of Jackie Pallo as he slammed Lescott to the turf should of course have brought a penalty, and his failure to dismiss Dirk Kuyt for his acrobatic assault on Phil Neville defied belief. While there have been inevitable calls for referees to explain decisions like these on TV afterwards, this could do more harm than good for the image of the game.

Producers won’t want to bring on referees to discuss their good decisions, it would just be used as an opportunity to expose them to public ridicule, confronting them with their errors of judgement and watching them squirm. Why not force them to eat witchetty grubs at the same time? I think we’ve got enough programmes like that on telly already thanks very much.

Given these poor decisions, it was understandable that David Moyes would struggle to contain his feelings in the post-match interviews. Pointing out to him that these things even themselves out over the season (as Liverpool fans still seething from the Chelsea game would do well to remember) would not have been the wisest move given his demeanour. However he allowed himself to get carried away in claiming that Everton deserved ‘at least a draw’ from the game and that only Clattenberg’s interventions, or lack of them, cost them the game; and that Liverpool in some way exercised undue influence over him.

The referee’s apparent confusion over the colour of his cards does nothing to lessen the fact that Hibbert’s dismissal was correct: he brought down Gerrard inside the box, who was moving towards the Everton goal with an obvious goalscoring opportunity. Penalty. Dismissal. That’s the law. If Gerrard reminded Clattenberg of this, then so what?

Had he shown only a yellow card, then a real injustice would have been perpetrated. So Everton justifiably played for a long time with 10 men, which eventually took its toll and brought about their defeat as much as any refereeing decision.

The stats show that Liverpool overall enjoyed over 60% of the possession, and that Everton had just one shot on target all game. Hardly supports the theory that, in the wider context of the game, they deserved more does it?

Liverpool had several chances to kill the game off even before the Kuyt incident, which would have rendered subsequent controversial events irrelevant. So by all means rail against poor refereeing decisions, but don’t let it convince you that you’re the victims of a criminal injustice.

As for Moyes’ assertion that Clattenberg was too friendly with Liverpool, and therefore favoured them with his decisions, well we can do without managers giving credence to the more mindless spectators who accuse referees of being cheats when they don’t make decisions in their favour. Referees need to be held to account for their performances, but they don’t deserve to be publicly pilloried and have their honesty called into question.