It doesn't take much for you average football fan to get enraged. Especially if a hideous grievance has been done to your team. Just at the weekend my home town team lost a Play-Off Final, at home. We had already thrown the league title away, and now we put in an insipid performance and lost. And yet the thing that angered me the most that day was when the opposing team scored the only goal of the game, they chose to run up and start celebrating in front of the stand of home fans i was in. They knew what they were doing too. This wasn't a coincidence or an unfortunate proximity for their low key hand shakes and slaps on the back. This was standing arms out stretched, team mates jumping on their backs, fists pumping. Un-necessary and could have incited a riot. Idiots.
There are lots of irrational feelings that a football match can uncover. Anger, sorrow, self-pity, pride, morose, happiness, ecstasy, jubilation and more. There aren't many feelings that can't be brought to the surface by a football match. As long as you have the bug. Otherwise this will sound like insanity.
At every match there is one man that will always court controversy, at least as far as you, or your friends or fellow fans are concerned. That man wears black (most of the time), blows a whistle and runs around with the power to make or ruin your weekend.
Unfair criticism is levelled at referees, reactions by fans to decisions are off the cuff, made in an instant and full of bias and through blinkered eyes.
To counter the accusations and insults from players, managers and fans alike, the F.A produce a new campaign for officials. The "RESPECT" initiative. A good idea, right? Referees have a difficult job. not made any easier by intimidation by players and management.
Wrong.
The referee now has his own bullet proof vest. A sanctuary for their ego. An excuse for their mistakes.
Because, they make mistakes. We all do. We forgive mistakes.
However, there are mistakes, and then there is incompetence, and certain referees have been making mistake after mistake with breathtaking incompetence.
These aren't difficult decisions in some cases. They are very easy. They are situations where a player has quite obviously played the ball, or not touched an opponent, or it has not been hand to ball. Or on the other hand, the player hasn't touched the ball, the player has touched an opponent, or it was ball to hand. There are instances of all those examples last weekend and the weekend before, ad infinite.
The issue isn't the decision per se. It isn't the repeated mistakes necessarily. It is the arrogance. The refusal to admit these mistakes. The inability to learn from these mistakes. The false apology when they admit a mistake but still add an excuse, "I thought the player was taken out by the goalkeeper".
Right there is the crux of the problem. He "thought". He can't have thought an incident occurred, it either did or it didn't. He was fouled or he wasn't. The ball was played or it wasn't. Maybe that is the problem. The referee is thinking. Thinking about the consequence of what decision he makes. Thinking that he may be shouted at by a high profile manager and/or player. Thinking he may be lambasted in the red tops the next day. Thinking, because he is being assessed.
I'm not suggesting i would be any better. My grandmother on the other hand. Joke. I really wouldn't be. Although the issue is that not everyone can be a professional referee, just like not everyone can be a professional footballer. The difference being that if a player is poor, he is dropped. He is no longer picked for the match day squad, he is banished to the reserves, isn't offered a new contract and is released, possibly never to be picked up by another professional team. A referee's indiscretion is either ignored, or pathetically punished by a temporary relegation only for them to be eased back in when no-one is looking. Nonsense.
There is no argument to suggest to be a referee isn't a thankless, difficult profession. There is probably no other job where you will get nothing but criticism and abuse. However, they are paid well, obviously not as well as a player, with a minimal chance of recourse. No performance plan, no first, second or final warning. Just support, backing and rejection of every poor performance and decision, with the added bonus of filling the F.A's coffers with recompense for a trumped up disrepute charge levelled at the manager or player of the club the referee just relegated by refusing a penalty. Not to mention the fine and loss of three points that a colleague ripped away from the same team earlier in the season. Don't worry though, these things balance out in a season. Try telling that to the teams that go down by a point or on goal difference.
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