Liverpool fans want this to be a story about a referee, but it's really a story about Liverpool conceding three goals in a 16-minute window after going down to ten men, and no second yellow card in the world makes a team collapse like that.
The dismissal itself was harsh. Ryan Gravenberch was booked in the first half for a late tackle on Elliot Anderson, then shown a second yellow in the 62nd minute for clipping Jeremy Doku as City broke. Plenty of neutral watchers thought the challenge didn't deserve it. Iraola went after the first booking too, insisting "the first foul of Ryan is never a yellow card, never." On both counts you can argue Chris Kavanagh was strict.
The alibi falls apart fast after that. A red card gives you a problem to solve. It doesn't pick your defenders' pockets on the flanks, and it doesn't make you fall over three times in a quarter of an hour. Doku was already running at Liverpool before Gravenberch walked. Erling Haaland put City ahead barely two minutes after the sending-off, Doku added the second, and Rayan Cherki finished it off in the 78th with a goal good enough that even people who loathe the club tipped their hat. This was a team that stopped competing the moment things got hard.
The tell is the shape of it. Good sides lose a man and dig in, make City earn every yard for half an hour. Liverpool, already hit by injuries, had managed about an hour. Then the floodgates opened: three goals in sixteen minutes, Anfield gone quiet. You don't do that because a referee from Ashton-under-Lyne got card-happy. You do that because your spine isn't there.
The conspiracy stuff is lazy. Yes, Kavanagh is Manchester-born. Yes, he was in the middle last season when Virgil van Dijk had an equaliser chalked off against City and Liverpool filed a complaint. Grudge noted. But if your whole case is that a local referee bent a game by sending off a player who'd already been booked for a late tackle, you're building a defence out of grievance because the football itself was too painful to look at.
City's financial record is the real stain on this win, not the officiating. Less than two weeks before this match, City were found guilty of serious breaches of the Premier League's financial rules across the better part of a decade. They're appealing, and the sanctions haven't been decided. That verdict hangs over every "statement" they make this season, and it'll keep hanging there until somebody with the power to punish them actually does. That's what's worth resenting about City right now.
It has nothing to do with why Liverpool lost, though. They sit mid-table, nine points behind a City side that's won its first six and keeps winning in every competition. Iraola can moan about the cards all he wants. His players quit the contest, and a free kick from the referee's association won't fix that.
