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Monday, September 05, 2016

Criticism of refs shows ignorance of what a tough job it is at the highest levels

Although we're in the same business, I don't know sports writer Martin Samuel. I've seen him in stadium press tribunes with the other Fleet Street royalty. But I'm just an anonymous news agency hack while these people are kings of their trade. I've enjoyed Samuel's writing over the years as well. I prefereed him at the Times, but that's just personal taste.

However I think he's got it badly wrong in his contribution to the debate on former referee Mark Halsey's surprise tweet last week, in which he said he had, before he retired, been pressured by the body that runs English refereeing into telling a lie about whether he had seen an incident that merited a red card.
As you all probably know by now, a player cannot be sanctioned if a referee at a top level says he witnessed the offence but decided it did not merit punishment. But if he says he did not see the incident, the player can be thumped with a ban by the Football Association.
Sergio Aguero had his collar felt for elbowing Winston Reid. Referee Andrew Marriner, just a few yards away and looking at the two players, told the FA he had not seen the elbow and would have sent Aguero off if he had seen the elbow.
This is where Samuel enters the picture. He finds it impossible to countenance that Marriner did not see the elbowing, preferring to accuse Marriner of lying.

"Andre Marriner had to claim to be unsighted on the day, when he was plainly just mistaken," wrote Samuel.

This is where Samuel needs to step out of the media tribune and go and stand on a pitch with a whistle in his mouth, watching 90 minutes of incidents. Referees make dozens or hundreds of decisions in a game. Some of them are wrong.
The real answer is frighteningly banal. Marriner was quite possibly looking at feet rather than heads, or he just blinked. Things happen in the blink of an eye. Believe me. I get it every Saturday or Sunday. "How could you not see that ref?" Well I blinked, or I was looking 3 yards in a different decision, I was still looking at a player's aggressive reaction to a challenge and hadn't followed the ball. All these things could quite easily mean that Marriner did not see the incident with Aguero.
Strikes me that leaping from the incident to accusing Marriner of lying is intellectually shoddy, and shows a lack of real understanding of how the action unfolds in a game.
As for Halsey, he has also disappoitned me. I always liked him as a referee, but he seems to have - along with former head referee Keith Hackett - donned the mantle of crusader against widespread corruption or incompetence in the ranks of their former colleagues.
There is an element of biting the hand that fed you from Halsey. 
Critics, most of them of the armchair variety, appear to enjoy leaping on the big paradox of football. that it is refereed by people who make mistakes. And those mistakes are inevitable unless a radical change in the way the sport is refereed is introduced. Technology may answer some of the questions, but it doesn't answer all of them. And that's why there'll always be a man (or woman) in the middle who'll always be an easy target for the scribblers and complainers because it's impossible to be right all the time.
 

 

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