If you want to know how incompetent the referees are in this country then just go back and look at the free-kick for the sending off. No, I don't mean the decision itself, I mean the actual free-kick...
The referee puts a line in front of the ball and a line for the defenders to stand behind. Just before he is about to blow for the kick to be taken the Leicester players point out that the wall is now well in front of that line that he drew, at least a yard in front of it. So he ushers them back, but instead of telling them to stand behind the line that he has already drawn, he makes them retreat about a foot and then draws a new line. As soon as he starts walking back the wall starts moving forward again, and clearly none of them are standing behind the new line, and are back to standing where they were before he ushered them back. At one point you can actually see him telling them to get behind the line but they just ignore him, so he just blows the whistle and the free-kick is taken.
If the referee can't get something as simple as getting players to stand behind a line right, how is he going to judge whether something that happens 15 yards away at high speed is a foul or not?
If you also look at the sending off itself, the referee doesn't give the free kick straight away, and instead seems to look at the assistant before blowing the whistle, so suspect that the assistant gave the foul rather than the referee thinking that Vardy got to the ball first. So if the referee is sending him off for denying a goal scoring opportunity and not for serious foul play then surely VAR have to get involved and tell him that the defender clearly did get the ball? My concern is that VAR thought he sent him off for the serious foul play and didn't think that was a clear and obvious error and so didn't get involved, which would be another process error by VAR, which would be even worse than just getting the decision worse.
Either way, the level of incompetence all round is just utterly depressing.
