We caught up with Jihai this afternoon to ask for his take on the incident in the wake of Saturday’s 3-1 defeat at St Andrews.
The Chinese international player was still in disbelief after the decision which he said ‘killed the game off’ for the Blues and gave Birmingham hope in their fight to remain in the top flight.
Sun described his view of the spot-kick award, saying: “The ball was in our penalty area and had crossed from to the where I was. I turned around, chased the ball with McSheffrey, and it was in front of me.
“He went for the ball and tried to obviously push me, but I just used my shoulder for a 50/50, maybe 51 in my favour!
“I tried to do my job as normal. When I heard the whistle, I thought he was diving maybe, but the referee pointed to the spot.
“I thought; ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe it.’ Sometimes when you are sad, you cry, but it was more than that. I could not believe it – even somebody who knows a little bit about football wouldn’t think that was a penalty.
“I couldn’t do anything about it so I had to walk away – it’s the only thing I could have done and that decision killed the game off for us.”
The award came at a time when City were the better team and Birmingham were just about holding on to their slender lead, despite being down to 10-men following the dismissal of Franck Queudrue for his foul on Benjani.
But reflecting on the game itself, Jihai continued: “It wasn’t our best team on Saturday due to injuries, illness and there were a lot of players coming back from the national team.
“We didn’t perform as well as we could have and the reason we lost wasn’t just down to the referee, we should have done better.”
