Year kicks off with some poor decisions

Since then, we've earned ourselves another away point at Newcastle, who have now lost Pardew to Palace, and West Brom have appointed Tony Pulis who it appears wanted assurances of a £20 million kitty for new players before accepting the role of head coach.

Steve McClaren is currently the favourite with the bookies to be the next leader of the Toon, this despite him joining Steve Bruce in saying he wouldn't be moving from his current role. Interestingly, Bruce is now equal favourite to be the next Premier League manager to leave his job alongside Robert Martinez.

Our draw at St. James' Park has left us still next to bottom in the league just three points ahead of bottom club Leicester. More positively, we are only three points behind Sunderland who currently occupy 14th place.

I've now had the opportunity to have taken a good look at the New Year's Day games and once again the stand out has been some of the refereeing decisions.

I suppose I should start at Anfield where Liverpool led Leicester 2-0 at half time with Steven Gerrard having twice scored from the penalty spot. All the news since from that club has surrounded Gerrard and his decision to leave at the end of the season for America, but he was a very luck player to have been given those two opportunities.

Mike Jones was the referee so no one should have been surprised that the horror decisions went in favour of the home side. He awarded Liverpool two penalties for hand ball. The second of them looked a very poor decision but the first one is absolutely ridiculous given the ball smashed Wes Morgan in the face.

There's a funny side to it of course. Leicester getting on the wrong end of penalty decisions is something to savour. Nigel Pearson has, apparently, suggested we should use technology on penalty awards. I wonder where they would have finished in the league last season had we employed such technology.

It was the opposite at Hull. The home side should have had an early penalty against Everton which was given as a free kick outside the box. The referee here was Kevin Friend and he and his assistant got this one very wrong.

At least the two Merseyside teams didn't benefit too much from them. Everton still lost at Hull while Leicester came back to draw at Liverpool. Their first goal from David Nugent was his first from open play since he scored a winner for them against QPR last April.

As for QPR, they benefited from the erratic refereeing of Anthony Taylor and one inept assistant. Quite how neither of them saw goalkeeper Rob Green come out of his box early in the game and handle the ball is hard to understand. It was a clear hand ball, a clear red card, yet they just allowed play to go on.

Green went on to have a stormer but there was more to come from the hapless referee in the second half. QPR's Karl Henry caught Wayne Routledge with a high challenge that warranted a yellow card.

Henry got away with it and seconds later was at it again, going in hard with a poor challenge on Routledge, himself a former QPR player. Routledge's reaction was something and nothing but he was the one to get a red card.

QPR led at the time; thankfully some justice was done with a late Wilfried Bony equaliser, and further justice has been done with the FA overturning this ridiculous red card.

Chelsea lost 5-3 at Spurs, so I wondered who Jose Mourinho might blame this time. He surely couldn't blame the ball boys again could he?

No, this time it was the referee Phil Dowd for not awarding them a penalty when they were 1-0 up. For once, I thought Dowd got it right, but he didn't when he failed to send off Gary Cahill for kicking Harry Kane in the back.

It's not the first time Cahill has got away with it this season and, guess what, Mourinho had nothing to say on that.

Football fans often feel that referees are always against their own club; I'm no different. But this week it's certainly been other clubs suffering from poor decisions and not ourselves.

The next Premier League review will come in just over a week's time after the next round of games. This week of course we've had the excitement of the 3rd round of the FA Cup or we should have had. Instead we've got a Monday night game, kicking off around the same time as the 4th round draw is being made.

The results and stats from New Year's Day are below along with the leading goalscorers, each club's red and yellow card counts and the next Premier League fixtures.

Please note: The card counts don't include any received in the FA Cup. They will all be added in time for next week's review.