I dunno. Why is it every weekend the whole of the civilised world shakes its head as one at the good, bad or indifferent refereeing decisions witnessed in the Premier League? I'm not one to moan - really I'm not. I realise better than anyone that refereeing is a difficult job and that the errors of judgement they make are merely the actions of an ordinary human being, but things have now reached a critical point.
Last weekend I started to lose count of the many and varied instances of what I thought was bad refereeing. In the Midlesbrough v Sunderland game, there were three handballs that could have resulted in free kicks in dangerous areas of the pitch which went undetected. All of them were more than just 'ball to hand' situations and all would have seen a free kick given at a different ground on a different day.
The Man. United v Chelsea game was liberally littered with questionable refereeing anomalies. For a start, official Mike Dean decided to give Mikkel Jon Obi a red card for a tackle which, though crude, was worthy of at most a yellow card. He then decided that two minutes of stoppage time would be played at the end of the first half, but having allowed the injury time period to inexplicably last to a third minute, Carlos Tevez was able to score to put the home team ahead 1-0.
It's one thing for a referee or his assistants to make isolated misjudgements, but when several occur in one match to say nothing of several other matches, you have to start believing that something's wrong somewhere.
So here's what I think. In order to root out the bad referees, we should create a rating system that gives penalty points for poor performances. At the end of the month, the three referees with the most penalty points drop down a level (i.e. Premier League to Championship) and someone from the level below with the least number of penalty points comes up to replace them.
And how would points be awarded? Well here's what I've come up with so far using a scale of 1 for insignificant decisions to 10 for hideous ones...
Incorrect awarding of a red/yellow card: 7 points
Too many/too few red/yellow cards awarded: 6 points
Bad offside decision: 7 points
Poor handball decision: 7 points
Poor timekeeping: 5 points
Failing to realise a player has been booked three times: 10 points
I'm sure there are more we can think of prior to sending such a suggestion off to Sepp Blatter. What would you add to the list and how many points would you allocate for each item?
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
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5 comments:
I don't think offside calls should count towards the ref, because that's the linesman's duty.
I think one of the problems with this system is that, in many cases, yellow cards are given for numerous borderline faults that wouldn't be awarded a card in an isolated situation. So it's difficult to say whether a single event was worthy of a yellow, because the player might have been troublesom all gam, and finally pushed the ref over the edge.
And how does this correspond with diving? Should a ref be penalized because he was fooled by Ronaldo?
Personally, I don't think holding refs accountable like this is good, because they would be terrified of doing something wrong during the game, and invariably screw up worse. and similarly, for the same reason we don't hold juries (in the US at least) accountable for a verdict that is overturned down the line, because you don't want the jury (or ref) to be so afraid of the consequences that they err on the 'safe' side, regardless of how they feel.
You're no fun... ;-)
Let me see... how can I turn this into a positive... I know - a system like the one I propose could make referees perform better because they'd be trying to receive as few penalty points as possible.
There - was that a convincing answer?!?! :-D
I suppose it could work.
Maybe a carrot rather than a stick might work better? Offer incentives for good games, rather than penalties for bad games.
Or both!
p.s. I didn't mean for my post to sound so negative, but I re-read it and DAMN, I must have been grumpy when I wrote that!
lol... no worries, Adam! Sometimes it pays to be a hard-nosed realist if you want to get things sorted!!
Nice subject for debate Chris.
I know a lot of fuss has been made in the media over the question of the Tevez goal, but no one has bothered to point out the the 4th official decides on the amount of added time at the end of each half, and that it is "a minimum of" xx minutes to be added on. It is still the ref's decision if any time after that is required.
We have to let the ref make the final decision, otherwise we will have all sorts of arguements about time keeping.
Can you imagine it is Chelsea had been 1-0 down at the end of 90 mins
the 4th offical announces 3 min added time, and on the stroke of 92 mins, the ball comes free in the chelsea half, SW-P races down the wing, all ManU playersw in the Chelsea half. SW-P only has the keeper to beat, and as he crosses the halfway line the ref blows for time, 20 secs early.
The trouble is, who's timing do you take to determine the added time (or even the 90 mins)? The Ref's watch, the Commentator, Sir Alex, the TV screen? The moment the 4th official holds up the added time board, it is still only the ref who really knows how much of the 45/90 minutes have been played.
One answer here might be to do as they do in Rugby. In the League version I believe an external timekeeper is responsible, and the game ends on the hooter. In the Union code, the ref calls "time out" and the external timekeeper rewinds the clock, and at the end of the game the ref is informed that time is up and when the ball next goes dead the game ends.
So which do we go for? Instant end or wait for the ball to go dead?
There will still be arguments over the amount of time lost by timewasting or injuries or pitch invasions. The whole ethos of the game these days if money inspired, and as such whoever loses with call "Foul" no matter what.
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