The O's robbed at Elland Road

The O's earned a point at Elland Road in an encounter that should have given Orient three points in the bag. A abmysal performance by referee Nigel Miller kept Leeds in the game. Dennis Wise, the Leeds manager, had before kick off asked the authorities to remove Miller from the fixture because Miller sent Wise to the stands in a fixture against Southend last season. You could say that Nigel Miller did everything he could to make Wise smile after the game...

Sean Thornton put Orient ahead within ten minutes with a curling free kick that curled into the far corner, but after 31 minutes Thornton was sent off after the ref accused him of elbowing Sebastien Carole, a decision that Orient has decided to appeal.

After 55 minutes the ref got it wrong again, giving Leeds a corner that never was... And the result was the equalizer. After 82 minutes the ref awarded Leeds a dubious penalty against Paul Terry, but the spotkick was blasted over. 5 minutes from time ref Miller failed to reward Orient the winning goal when Adam Boyd's 86th-minute shot squeezed through Leeds keeper Casper Ankergren's hands and appeared to cross the line before he recovered.

Martin Ling was furious after the game and said after the Elland Road clash that the referee had got four key decisions wrong - the sending off, awarding Leeds the corner that led to their equaliser, giving a penalty to the home side and denying Adam Boyd a perfectly legitimate winner - and he does not regret his comments.

He told the club's official website: "Having reviewed the game on the tape, I stand by everything I said on Saturday.

"He's got all four major decisions wrong, and although we can't appeal the corner, the penalty or the goal, we can appeal over Sean's red card and we'll be doing so.

"We'll hear the outcome later in the week, and after that we have to leave this game in the past and focus on an important match with Port Vale this Saturday."

“Is he going to stand up and say he was abysmal or hide behind the referees’ union?

“I’ll wait for the excuses to come out, but he’s crumbled under the pressure. He went to shake my hand at the end, but I said, ‘not a hope in Hell’. It was a pressure situation but he couldn’t handle that pressure. He’s cost us dear and you are talking about the livelihood of clubs.”

Terry, brother of John, the England captain, added: “It was very strange and the referee got the big decisions wrong. At this level, you can’t make the mistakes he has. At the end, it was ridiculous. Even the Leeds players said it was a yard over the line. It’s not Leeds’s fault, but with the luck they are having, they can afford to lose 15 points  and still go up.”

Wise refused to discuss Miller, which seemed odd considering how much he had had to say about him earlier in the week. “We had enough chances to win the game, but things wouldn’t fall,” he said. “The missed penalty summed things up. I don’t want to talk about him. Was it a clear goal? If it was, then we have had a bit of luck. But you need that. We’ve had some bad luck as well.”

Orient lineup: S Nelson – S Purches, A Thelwell, T Mkandawire, C Daniels – A Chambers, S Thornton, P Terry, J Demetriou – A Boyd, W Gray (sub: J Ibehre, 66). Substitutes not used: B Saah, J Melligan, W Corden, A Palmer. Sent off: Thornton.

Some match highlights here: http://www.orientsupporter.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=73&Itemid=43

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