Bernardo Silva critical of referee over disallowed Man City goal

Bernardo Silva does not think Manchester City should have had a goal disallowed in Sunday’s defeat to Liverpool as the midfielder criticised referee Anthony Taylor for a lack of consistency.

City suffered their first league defeat of the season as they fell to a 1-0 loss at Anfield, with Mohamed Salah scoring a brilliant second-half winner.

Before that, Phil Foden had a goal wiped out following a VAR review, with referee Taylor urged to watch a replay on the pitchside monitor – a shirt-pull by Erling Haaland on Fabinho in the build-up led to the strike being disallowed.

That ultimately cost the champions a point, and Silva was particularly disgruntled by Taylor’s decision given how he had refereed the game until that moment.

He told Sky Sports: “What we expect from the referees is consistency in the decisions.

A tough one to take.

1-0 #ManCity pic.twitter.com/BBOar1vOc3

— Manchester City (@ManCity) October 16, 2022

“When you go through a path of not whistling little contacts through the whole game, you need to keep those decisions and keep going that way.

“If you want to whistle all of them, whistle all of them, but if from the beginning of the game you are not whistling all the little fouls, and we saw in this game the referee was letting us play, which is good, it’s fine.

“Then, if there’s a goal, you cannot whistle that soft one.

“If you want consistency from the referee, you cannot change just because there’s a goal and just because it’s a tough decision.

“You have to make the tough decision and keep the goal in my opinion.”