Dzeko ‘goal is offside’ – Blackburn boss Steve Kean bemoans Manchester City winner

Steve Kean (Getty Images)

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Blackburn Rovers boss Steve Kean has blamed the match officials for his side’s 1-0 home defeat against Manchester City, which has extended their winless run to 10 matches.

Edin Dzeko scored the only goal of the game in the second half to hand City their first away of the year, but Kean said after the match that he was upset with some of the decisions his team received, inisting that the Bosnian’s winner was offside.

“We feel very hard done by, we feel their goal is offside,” Kean told reporters. “Balotelli is standing in front of Paul Robinson and we felt we had a good shout for a penalty ourselves with the bump on Niko Kalinic but he made it hard for the referee by staying on his feet.

“After first 15 of the first half we got ourselves into a good shape and dealt with the rotation that Man City were doing, we were in ascendancy just before half time and we continued that in second half, I thought were excellent in the first 20 minutes of the second half and that was probably the period when we had to score but we didn’t carve out many clear cut chances.

Blackburn’s latest defeat leaves them in 16th place in the Premier League, but only one point above Wigan who occupy the last relegation place.

However, Kean remains optimistic that Rovers will survive and he has targeted Saturday’s home match against Bolton Wanderers as the start of a revival.

He added: “Before tonight we’d only lost once since Christmas here, to lose two would be psychologically  tough, but we’ve got a good group, they’re strong characters, if we play like that we’ll get points, I don’t think we’ll have a defeat against Bolton.”

“We were positive tonight, we played with two up and David Dunn pushing on to try and play passes in behind. I thought we gave the back four of Man City a hell of a lot to think about.”

“I think at this stage of the season with the way results are going, every single point is difficult to get, if we perform like that I’m sure we pick up some points.”