Tomas Soucek was handed one of the most controversial red cards of the season on Saturday night during the closing stages of West Ham’s Premier League clash away at Fulham.The Czech midfielder was sent off by referee Mike Dean for catching Aleksandar Mitrovic in the face with his elbow.Replays showed that Soucek had barely made contact with the Fulham striker, who went down holding his face. And it certainly didn’t look like deliberate violent conduct.But Dean, who watched the incident back on his pitch-side monitor during a VAR review, felt Soucek was guilty of violent conduct and brandished the red card.Dean, one of the Premier League’s most experienced match officials, was also the ref who incorrectly sent off Southampton’s Jan Bednarek against Manchester United earlier this week. That decision was subsequently overturned on appeal.West Ham boss David Moyes told reporters in his post-match interview that he was “embarrassed for the people who have made that decision” to send off Soucek.

What Garth Crooks said about Mike Dean

Meanwhile, an old clip of BBC Sport pundit Garth Crooks ranting about Dean is currently going viral on social media following Saturday’s incident at Craven Cottage.

The clip, from September 2015, sees Crooks blast Dean for wanting to be “the star too often” during matches.

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"We all want to see 11 versus 11, it's a great game," Crooks told BBC's Final Score after Dean sent off Gabriel Paulista during a clash between Arsenal and Chelsea. "Don't look for excuses to send players off, that's not your job, just do your job and try your very best to keep players on the pitch.

"If they've got to go, they've got to go, but this was not that situation. I think Mike Dean's a good referee, but he's got one fault: he wants to be the star too often.

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"It's really getting on my nerves because he's spoiling great games. It's not about you, Mike, it's about the games - people come here and pay good money to see football, not for you to get overofficious like a petulant school teacher."

Watch the clip here…

Five years later and many are arguing, particularly after this latest incident, that Crooks got it spot on.

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That said, we’ve seen *so* many baffling decisions from Premier League match officials since the introduction of VAR that there’s every chance another referee would have made the exact same decision.

Liverpool legend Jamie Carragher hit the nail on the head when he tweeted: “VAR has not helped officials, it’s making them look worse.”

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How much more of this can football fans take?