The tweet is a PR nightmare and sounds unprofessional. Reality, at least in this country, is you can't question the integrity of referees (unless you're Alex Ferguson of course) because everyone closes ranks.
All the focus is on whether Atwell is compromised because he supports Luton, rather than the actual errors. They can use a plant in the media to make that assertion if they wish. But their official communication has to be professional and requesting the audio to seek clarification as to why these errors occurred.
We get Tierney/Kavanagh/Taylor every other week and while i'd rather the club made more of it, i'd want them to do it off the record rather than in an official statement, you've got to box smarter than that. You can bet City and United wouldn't put up with Scouse refs. Nor would Neville. Of course Carragher says nothing.
The thing is though, no different approach would have changed anything in the public discussion. We've seen it ourselves with the countless decisions against us. It doesn't matter, if you just point out the questionable decision, because people will simply call you bitter or tell you to "Get over it as this evens itself out over the course of a season", no matter how outrageous the decision was (I mean, not giving a completely legitimate goal is about as bad a decision you can get). The authorities and the media don't want to have a discussion about the refereeing, full stop. That's why you're not getting one and the debate is shifted to turn legitimate issues into a laughing matter or something to be outraged about.
Again, we've seen how that worked with the Spurs-match and officials going to Saudi or Dubai or wherever to get paid big money by people who own teams in the Premier League. In every normal company there are strict compliance rules, but of course PGMOL don't need those. There wasn't even a debate about whether that's something that needs to be looked at. It was mentioned in one article, Webb said ref will have to tell PGMOL if they get those kinds of gigs (as was already the case before this whole thing), but other than that nothing happened, because nobody wanted to look at the underlying issue. Same thing is true with this Luton thing. Again, 18 years ago when we were playing in the FA Cup final a ref from the Wirral couldn't referee the game as a precaution so no discussion about a possible bias might come up (both to protect the competition and the ref himself). Why wasn't this done for yesterday's game? PGMOL have loads of refs who could have been VAR in yesterday's game. It's not as if Attwell is some kind of outstanding ref needed for this kind of fixture. It's even worse, if Nottingham Forest pointed it out beforehand, that the guy is a Luton supporters and PGMOL didn't care about it. But again, this arrogance or incompetence by PGMOL won't be talked about in the public discussion. It'll be about some awful narritive how Nottingham Forest are bitter and classless and how Clattenburg should resign.
There need to be changes in PGMOL and the refereeing structure in England. The problem is, nothing will get done when you have people like Neville and Carragher steering the public discussion.
