Nobody has all the answers, but here's a few ponts to consider.
So Mike Jones has been demoted to fourth official this weekend, according to one of the papers. There’s been no official word on it that I can see, but the inference appears to be that it’s because of his performance in the Newcastle/Manchester City game. I’m wondering what good that will really do? “Don’t do it again!” Well how can he guarantee that he won't? He called it as he saw it at the time. It was the wrong decision, but what does punishing him for it achieve? What, is he going to grow another set of eyes or suddenly ‘get better’ at being a referee? How does he do that? He doesn’t, he can’t. A demotion should surely only happen if he’s been exposed generally as unfit to be a referee, but then surely he should just be fired? He’ll be back refereeing again next week, won’t he? What, so the time he’s had to think about what he’s done will ensure that it doesn’t happen again? I don’t think so. More likely that, the next time, he simply allows a goal where an offside player was interfering with play. He’s either good enough to referee at this level or he isn’t, and if he’s not good enough for this level, he shouldn’t be good enough for any professional level. If an incompetent official isn’t good enough for Liverpool or Spurs, he shouldn’t be good enough for Ipswich, Leeds or Southend either. The truth is that Jones is probably as good (i.e. bog-standard) as most referees, better than a few (e.g. Lee Mason, though it wouldn’t be hard) and worse than others, and that will be the case for whoever takes his place as well. These men are flawed and are being asked to do an increasingly impossible job. Punishing them achieves nothing in my view. They need help, and I’m saying that as someone who has been rendered livid in the past by the likes of Mason and Howard Webb.
One referee and two linesmen are, in my view, simply not equipped to effectively manage a top-class football game in 2014 without making serious mistakes on a regular basis. The authorities and the media, the managers and players, need to either live with that or make a genuine effort to do something about it. Some of them certainly don’t help themselves at times (e.g. you often get the impression that a referee has gone into a game with a predetermined idea of keeping his cards in their pocket, a recipe for disaster – see: World Cup final 2010), but most contentious decisions are just basic human error. That human error has become more frequent over time due to two factors. Firstly, the game has undoubtedly gotten faster, particularly in the past two decades or so. Players are fitter than ever thanks to advances in diet and sports science, they’re stronger, they’re quicker, they’re more agile, the balls are lighter, the jerseys are more breathable, the pitches are better, etc. The technology to cover the sport has also moved on, and these days viewers and pundits can see and rehash contentious incidents from five, six, seven different angles within mere seconds of it happening. Referees and linesmen, on the other hand, aside from having more convoluted rules and interpretations of rules to learn, haven’t really changed at all. They’re still part-time, they still have split-seconds to see incidents and make a decision on them and, most crucially of all, each of them still has only the one pair of eyes.
The second factor is that, as much as I love the game, this sport is dishonest to its very core and referees often appear to be nothing more than marks or rubes to be conned. Players going down under the slightest contact is a prime example. I watched a game on ESPN Classic a few months back, Everton vs. Spurs at Goodison from roughly 1985, and players on the end of hefty tackles were actually struggling to their feet rather than staying down or looking straight to the ref. Nothing has changed more in the English game in the intervening thirty years than this facet of it. The amount of times players just hit the ground under the slightest touch of an opposition player, not ‘diving’ necessarily but waiting for the contact and immediately hitting the deck, has gotten to ridiculous levels now, and every team does it. The spotlight is inevitably always going to be shone on the major talking points like Tiote’s ‘goal’ or Sterling’s ‘offside’ (both against Manchester City in recent weeks), but realistically you could watch any Premier League game this weekend and pick at least ten or fifteen examples of the referee getting something wrong. It’s just that most of these decisions are so minor that they don’t get picked up on, but they happen all the time. So what does a referee do? Wave play on and risk his decision being replayed from countless different angles for days as the manager on the wrong end of a goal the other way curses his name, and worse, to find out that he actually got it wrong and that the player was actually fouled? Or blow the whistle every single time? How the fuck can you tell a foul from a tumble anymore? Aside from the game becoming faster and making the job more difficult and demanding in that sense, the officials are also generally having to deal with twenty-two players, six substitutes and two managers trying to intimidate, cajole and often con them into giving decisions their way nearly every single game. And then managers complain when a referee’s interpretation is so utterly skewed that he doesn't know whether he's being conned or not, or when the psychological pressure becomes so intense with five, six, seven players surrounding him and angrily demanding a decision that he makes the wrong one?
I would have felt a lot more sympathy for Alan Pardew at the weekend if it hadn’t been for the certain knowledge that: (a) he would have gladly taken that goal being disallowed if it had happened at the other end, and (b) he probably has no problem with his players going down under minimal contact rather than trying to play the ball (and if he hadn’t called Pellegrini a ‘fucking old c*nt’, of course). Pellegrini didn’t have much to say at all, beyond it being the right decision, which it wasn’t, shades of Mourinho and the farcical penalty for his team against West Brom earlier in the season. Well what works for you one weekend can work against you the next. It would be interesting to see Pellegrini’s reaction if that kind of ‘correct’ decision was to go against his team in the Nou Camp next month, for example. On that hypothetical occasion, his players will no doubt surround the referee again as they did at St. James’ Park on Sunday, but you live by that sword and you can die by it too, and I dare say the likes of Xavi, Iniesta, Alves and the rest have been at that game a damn sight longer, that ‘game’ being ‘manipulating the referee’ which is increasingly a pre-requisite of sustained success at the highest level. Manchester United had it for over two decades and it gave them an undoubted edge over their rivals, at least domestically (see Graham Poll’s recent revelations on the relief he would feel if Manchester United won a game at Old Trafford). Mourinho’s teams have also long done it effectively, as have Barcelona and Real Madrid. I’m no psychologist and certainly no apologist for certain referees who continually make bad decisions, but that kind of behaviour has got to have the effect of emasculating, intimidating and weakening officials who are then supposed to be able to do their jobs in an effective manner.
Poll’s aforementioned comments give just a glimpse of the psychological pressure that referees are under in the modern game. These are human beings and will continue to make mistakes until action is taken to (a) ease the pressure on them from players, managers and the media, and (b) give them a safety net where on-the-spot, split-second decisions can be reviewed and reinforced. That starts with the authorities. I would see two things happen in an ideal world. I would have referees wearing microphones so that not only can we hear the rationale for their decisions, we can also hear what players are saying to them. My suspicion is that the constant sniping that goes on during a game would ease up and allow them to do their jobs, if not in peace, then at the very least with less outside influence. And secondly, I would see limited use of video technology for the kinds of black and white decisions (like Tiote and Sterling) that, amidst the recriminations that happen from both sides over contentious decisions, could easily be settled without overly delaying the game. Diving is another story, and that can only really be addressed by taking retrospective action after the fact, but in terms of making the decision-making process on the pitch more robust and fit for purpose, it’s inevitable that technology will have to play a part eventually. Otherwise I fear that we’ll simply have to live with the mistakes in the hope that they do, in fact, ‘even themselves out’. They don’t, of course, and some teams, the ones who actively target the referees, will continue to have an edge while others simply have to just put up with it.
