Michael Oliver didn’t have the best of games on Sunday, making two controversial decisions that helped Manchester City put Arsenal to the sword.

First of all, it should be clear that, even with a competent referee in charge, Arsenal still would have lost to Manchester City on Sunday. Nonetheless, whatever small chance the Gunners had became even smaller when Michael Oliver and his team made two questionable calls.

The first was the decision to award Manchester City a penalty for Nacho Monreal’s coming together with Raheem Sterling. This was Oliver’s eighth Arsenal game since the start of last season. He’s now awarded five penalties in those games, with four of them against Arsenal.

The second big decision was to deem David Silva onside in the build-up to City’s third goal. The Arsenal defenders thought he was obviously offside and stopped playing entirely. Replays showed they were right; Silva was quite comfortably in an offside position.

The Arsenal fans were not impressed with his performance, and are starting to see him as the new Mike Dean.

https://twitter.com/Lacazest/status/927204554281816067

Olivers’ performance shouldn’t distract from Arsenal’s own pitiful display, however. Bad decisions going against the team certainly doesn’t help, especially when they’re struggling.

It tells us that not only are Arsenal terrible, they’re not even getting good luck to balance it out.