Its going to where he's running to. You can argue it is too high for him to reach but the issue is it draws attention to the foul, and then the official is being asked to see Hojlund pulling Rodri down and choose to deliberately ignore it.
There's plenty to pick at with our officials but I'm not sure I'd even have that one high on the list of garbage decisions in our own games, never mind anyone else's. I think its one where if it gets given its a bit unlucky, but you only really have yourselves to blame as the defending team.
There's decisions every week where the officials just seem to completely invent something that never happened, so pretend something that clearly did happen didn't, and this one doesn't come under either of those categories. It was soft but there was a foul there so its running the risk of how the official interprets it.
If that happens down the other end, do you think Michael Oliver, Newcastle fan who referees in the UAE in his spare time, who ignored the Romero penalty incident for us with a perfect view and failed to send Kovacic off against Arsenal, intervenes and gives a penalty to United against City?
The fact that the answer to this question isn’t an unequivocal yes, and quite probably is a no if you’re honest about it, should tell you all about Michael Oliver’s fitness to keep refereeing games in the Premier League.
But the PL is so full of integrity and it’s just those pesky southern Europeans who are bribeable like that Negreira fella, that would never happen over in good old Britain.
Referees clearly use the laws of the game to defend not giving anything that they can get away with to us, and give everything they can get away with against us, because by doing that they get the media off their backs. Compare Onana’s foul on that Wolves fella with what Robert Sanchez did to Gabriel Jesus and ask yourself whether it’s reasonable that out of those two incidents, Onana’s is the one which is worthy of a weeks-long media campaign and demoting not just the VAR but also the on-field ref while Sanchez smashing Jesus in the face gets a few post-match comments and that’s about it.
Now take those media narratives and add a bit of “referee is employed by one club’s owners” and you get a situation where we get calls like this cherry-picked to decide games in a certain team’s favour. Situations like these are never given, except for City or against us. Situations like Onana’s are never given, but when they don’t get given against us it’s a major issue but never when other keepers get away with it.
I’m clearly rambling now but the club needs to compile all the decisions against us, compared with similar situations getting called for other teams, and ask how it is possible to have all these decisions consistently go against you. I mean, for it to be completely random and by chance you’d have to be looking at microscopic chances with the amount of decisions where the refs have flipped a coin and it’s always landed on the call that doesn’t benefit us. All because of one call in the beginning of the season where a call that never gets called didn’t get called against us.