With the Premier League entering its final quarter, tempers are becoming frayed. Alex Ferguson has installed a Stalinist media blackout lest he mutter something to a reporter that could later land him in hot water, while managers at both ends of the table have been getting red-faced over refereeing decisions: Arsene Wenger for the incorrect offside call in his side’s disappointing draw with Sunderland and Mick McCarthy for the perennially lenient Mark Halsey’s refusal to show red to Alan Hutton for clear cut foul preventing a goal-scoring opportunity. These types of mistakes are infuriating, but they are part of the fabric of the game. No FIFA directive will be able to completely erase error from the game, and despite widespread endorsement of 'fair play’, it is not the reason people crush into regional stadia and cram into tightly packed plastic seats. It is not the reason people around the world pay a premium for the pleasure of watching the Premier League. Nor is it the reason, if you tune into Talk Sport or Five Live on a Saturday at 5pm, you will hear caller after caller not lamenting their current personal financial woes or the fact that their kid is having a rough time at the local comp, but lost in the narrative of a 90 minute game. A game riddled with problems, all the way from the inadequate coaching at grass roots level to the ultimately human capacity for officials to make mistakes in the heat of the moment. If everything in football was crushingly fair, the game would be reduced to a mechanical spectacle. Even Formula 1, one of the most technologically advanced sports, seeks to keep human error a factor.
On a personal level, as a Spurs fan, I nearly bit my tongue off at the injustice of Nani's goal against us at Old Trafford. However, I can also look at Sunday's game against Wolves with some distance and objectivity and see that Hutton should have walked. These are just scenes in the turbulent narrative of a competitive season. They provide talking points and raise blood pressure.
Some may argue that that the human error should be left to the 22 players, not the officials; that they will provide the spectacle with their ability, prowess and at times even their incompetence. This notion does an injustice to the game. I can remember many a Sunday morning spent pulling my shin pads on and trudging out onto wind swept playing fields where the cold numbed the bones. It was on those pitches that I learnt that a game can't happen without a referee, to keep the adolescent tempers in check, the baying parents under control. We cheated, we fouled, we made mistakes and mistimed tackles, and to stop it spiralling out of control there was a referee to defer to. Be it right or wrong, he had the final say.
Managers will always whinge when decisions go against them, complain about conspiracy when really it is only error. It is hard to accept the bizarre twists that shape a game and it would be comforting to think that everything is controllable, that life doesn't need to be so unfair. That is why the respect campaign for referees is not dependant on them getting it right all the time; you can't opt into it. The media witch hunt of specific referees is deplorable because it seeks to instil the notion that football would be more enjoyable if it was fairer. It wouldn't. There would be new gripes with a new system. No one has suggested replacing referees, so we need to start supporting them rather than turning them into scapegoats and pantomime villains.
~Ed
What a load of crud.
ReplyDeleteThe suggestion that referee's mistakes even themselves out is laughable.
Tell Mick McCarthy that it's ok that he was robbed of 2 points because you suffered at the hands of man u.
Watch how many games are influenced in man u's favour by poor reffing and tell us it's ok.
Nobody is saying we shouldn't have referees, just that they should be better at the job and they should be assisted by technology.
If everything was fair we could discuss the quaility of the players who won/lost us the game instead of the referee who did likewise.
S.R.P.
'Tell Mick McCarthy that it's ok that he was robbed of 2 points because you suffered at the hands of man u.'
ReplyDeleteThe point I was making was that where you get good decisions one week, the next you can get unlucky. Wolves were unlucky against Spurs and I don't watch enough Wolves games to give examples of good decisions in their favour.
'if everything was fair'
Fairness is an abstract concept and will never completely apply to a game. Even with video footage mistakes will get made and our expectations of officials getting them correct will be raised. This merely shifts the paradigm rather than solving the problem. Errors were made in the Super Bowl even with the aid of video evidence and far more time than could be granted in football.
Mr Ed. nobody ever said football should be error free but all we ask is consistency from officials. They have clear rules to follow. Take Man U v L'pool game: Ref. Clattenburg said Caragger should have seen red but he was given yellow on a career-threatening tackle. Maxi escaped unscathed after harrowing Rafael with the studs. It is a fact that some of these referees were grew-up in the Liverpool Golden Era and any non-Liverpool can do no good be it Man U or Spurs. Just look at the soft penalties Chelsea got in their last two games.
ReplyDeleteFairness is all part and parcel to competence. Has the FA considered using multiple clones of Pierre Luigi Collina?
ReplyDeleteThis was all very well, until the van Persie sending off tonight!
ReplyDeleteIt is a talking point, and does raise the blood pressure, but it isn't clear to me that a referee ought to be a part of the narrative of a season, or even a match. In order for the 'respect' campaign to work, the referee needs to respect the players, and sending someone off for tonight's offence seems to be treating the player as a disobedient kid, rather than, say, an adult who didn't hear the whistle.
The problem with some referees' mistakes is that some of them appear to owe a lot to the personality of the referee involved, rather than to the more general notion of 'human error'.
Anyway, I am rambling, and possibly ranting, so I shall sum up: most mistakes are OK, mistakes made for dickish reasons are not!