I pinched this from Football365.com and was written by John Nicholson and echoes many of my own thoughts.
I recently met a police officer. No, he wasn't busting me, he was off-duty in a local bar.
He said that when they attend an incident and ask for eye-witness statements, they almost always vary massively. He said an old woman had been knocked to the ground and had her handbag stolen in the street recently. The eye-witness reports variously reported the assailant as male, a teenage girl, Asian, ginger, black-haired, over six foot, average height, fat, medium build, wearing a red hoodie and blue jeans, a black coat and most hilariously of all, 'clearly had a wig on'.
All these observations were definite and not woolly or vague. They knew what they had seen and were keen to help out. When the person guilty of the crime was arrested he was actually 16, fair-haired, skinny and had been wearing a navy sweatshirt and black jeans. In short, he looked nothing like most of the eye-witness reports. Only one had got it 100% correct.
We should remember this before we spend a lot of energy and emotion slagging off referees - something so fashionable at the moment. We all think we see things with 20/20 vision but we rarely do, and that includes referees.
With the scrutiny on the men in black, green, yellow or whatever clown's costume they're wearing this week, at an all-time high thanks to the multiple camera angles and graphic devices which allow us to see the action from all angles, the cry comes from the masses that referees are all useless and have never been worse.
This is utter rubbish, Referees have always given poor decisions, it's just that as we were all standing on the terraces in the teeth of sleeting north-easterly, it was impossible to tell. And of course there were no TV cameras present.
In many ways, making the officials professional was the worst thing that happened because it meant everyone assumed that they would become so much better somehow; that their eyesight would improve and their decision-making along with it.
But clearly, he's just a man - and now, occasionally a woman - prone to mistakes and to being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Football's infinite variables guarantee it. Being a professional doesn't change that.
There was one loud voice on 606 over the holidays which confidently proclaimed that all referees in Europe were rubbish. Every single one of them. Obviously, he was some kind of omniscient being who has witnessed every game across all countries this season and not an emotionally incontinent idiot. But he's becoming all too typical as one fan after another, along with pundits, queue up to criticise the 'lack of consistency'. So much so that it has become a cliché.
As frustrating as it can be to have decisions go against you, my sympathies lie whole-heartedly with the man in the middle and the, usually two weedy-looking, boney-kneed nerdy men running the line.
Frankly, I'm surprised they get such a high percentage of decisions right. Players are institutionalised cheats and will lie and deceive for advantage as soon as take their next breath. You cannot trust their responses or words. They will try and bully you, Respect Campaign, my arse.
I have no idea how anyone manages to watch a line of players for offside while simultaneously looking for when the ball is kicked. Try it yourself, it's impossible, especially when the ball is hit at pace from midfield. You end up looking at either the ball or the back line, doing both requires a third eye. Quite how they get any call right is a mystery to me. I assume it's just luck or they have super-human powers.
The problem is with expectation. Fans expect too much from referees. They're humans and not infallible robots. They're all individuals and, like witnesses to a crime, are all bound to see things differently.
We might also want to consider that some of them maybe ever so slightly bent. No proof m'lud. I'm not accusing anyone specifically, but we know it has happened in football on one scale or another all across Europe.
If I was a referee and I could decide something such as how many yellow cards would be shown in a game, it would be very tempting to tell a mate to get a bet on for you. When you see some decisions that simply beggar belief, perhaps we should stop being so naïve - he's not useless, he's just got a bet on and doesn't fancy losing a big wedge of cash. In an age of rampant spread betting you don't have to be a terrible cynic to think some officials would use their position for financial advantage.
Even if we brought in technology to help referees, it wouldn't solve problems overnight. While blatant offside and handball might be eliminated, they'd be replaced by a rash of calls for video evidence on every bloody decision. After all, if you allow it for an offside, why not for a thrown-in - especially if it's one of Rory Delap's. Before you knew it, the game would be stopped every few minutes for a referee to refer to the bloke in the stands watching it on TV and those present still wouldn't be happy, feeling that the call had been wrongly made against them.
For example, we often see a player handle it while sliding in for a tackle in the box, his arm raised as part of his movement. Sometimes it's given as a penalty, sometimes it's not. The crucial aspect is to decide whether it's deliberate. Deliberate is a pen, not deliberate isn't. But no camera angle can tell you what is in a player's mind. That will always be open to human interpretation, be it the referee on the pitch or the man in the stands. And in such cases, we will all disagree as to whether it was deliberate or not. Thus, the cries that referees are rubbish would still go up even if we had the most invasive technological scrutiny because so many of the game's laws are about interpretation of intent.
It's no good weeping about how much money relies on them getting things right, accepting that there will be refereeing errors should be built into our fan DNA. The constant 'outrage' about a mistake or four is a tad pathetic really. Haven't you been watching football for however many years? It's always been like this; it's an intrinsic part of the game's culture.
We need some poor sucker to do the job. Christ knows why any sentient creature would take the task on in this day and age when you are little more than a piñata for the fans, player and managers to beat, often merely to deflect attention from their own side's inadequacies.
If they were allowed to do a press conference and point out why they made specific decisions and also to apologise for errors, perhaps it would take the sting out of the hatred for them. The silence allows people to feel they are aloof and arrogant, whereas if you actually saw them talking, we might have some human empathy. But mistakes would still happen.
With football now playing to a TV audience, the referees are in a no-win situation as fans sitting at home get themselves into a lather about a wrong decision after seeing it in slow motion five times from five different camera angles. Often, somewhat ludicrously, claiming it was an easy decision to get right; unable to tell the difference between the here and now and hindsight and often not even cogent on their own understanding of the laws of the game.
As a fan for over 40 years, I've stood on terraces and been convinced I've seen something happen that simply hasn't and vice versa. Referees are just the same. Let's face it, we all get stuff wrong, so lay off the poor sods or if you think you're so infallible, go and do the job yourself and see how you like being abused by thousands of people for a living.
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