Picture This:

Team A are playing Team B.  Team A have, playing up front for them, a striker who cost millions of pounds and is being payed a further 50 grand or so a week to do one job- score.  In the course of the game he has 3 or 4 gilt-edged chances to do just that and misses every one of them.  Therefore, Team A fail to find the net all match despite dominating.  Meanwhile, at some point, Team B break up field and earn a contentious penalty which the referee has to reward in a split-second having seen the action only once from just a single angle.  Team B score the penalty and win 1-0.  Later on it is seen, after slowing the action to a crawl and viewing it from numerous vantage points, that the penaly maybe shouldn’t have been given.  And so, who does the manager of Team A blame for his side’s defeat: the striker or the referee?

We all know the answer.

Not a week goes by without a good number of managers and Alan Green blaming a referee for getting every decision wrong in the course of a particular match.  The officials, so we are lead to believe, are incompetent, useless and- let’s face it, enough managers get as close as they legally can to suggesting this- corrupt.  This is all despite the fact that referees go through a long recruitment process to get into the ranks of the professional game and their performances are constantly and stringently monitored.  And yet, so the bosses and Green constantly suggest, all we end up with are blind, useless idiots who couldn’t give a correct decision with a gun to their heads and 4 hours of replays from two hundred different angles at up to 3000% zoom.

Can’t we all finally agree that this is utter conkers and of no use to the game of football whatsoever?  If referees are constantly getting big decisions wrong, like Thierry Henry’s handball or about 75% of yellow cards dished out while Alan Green’s commentating, then can’t we just all agree that the job of the referee has been rendered impossible in the modern game.  The system of one ref and two men on the line was invented decades and decades ago when the players smoked 40 a day and worked in smelting plants for most of the week.  Now they’re super-trained athletes who ping the ball around the field at 200mph and yet the system to officiate their play is exactly the same.  Of course decisions are going to be made incorrectly if this is the case, and the refs get absolutely no help whatsoever beyond a momentary glimpse of an incident, usually with a couple of players in the way.

I’m not writing this because I know what the solution is- whether it’s video technology or extra officials or whatever anyone else comes up with- but because I know the game won’t be improved if referees are still being talked about as if doing the job perfectly for 90 minutes time after time was as possible as it clearly isn’t.  If the media for once challenged managers who lazily reflected on referee’s decisions as the reasons why they’ve been beaten that day rather than questioning what circumstances caused the ref to make that decision in the first place then maybe we’d get somewhere and maybe the call to FIFA to give referees some assistance in whatever form would become irresistable.

And best of all, Alan Green would have nothing left to say.

Alan Green · football · referees

Personally I don’t think the Americans are such a bad bunch at the end of the day, in much the same way I think a bit of crack now and then doesn’t do you any bad. What they do suck at big time, though, is sports. Not sport itself – they’re fast little bastards and tall as trees when need be – but their sports are full-on all-round lame. All my life I’ve just laughed them off but in the last ten years, more and more of their theatricism and showmanship has pervaded the true English sport – football – and this last month has seen two examples that if they were ever to occur in the Premier League I would have to stop visiting pubs showing dodgy Arabian coverage and getting sly tickets from my mate at the Rovers.

This first example shows the kind of shit, unwarranted hype of every moment in a game that Sky do to a degree, but ITV are the worst culprits of. EVERY! moment has to BE! punctuated by SOMETHING! so exciting you can’t change CHANNEL! Witness this bunch of Yankee ponces getting flustered over a broken bit of glass.

Horrendous.

Next up we’ve got a piece of hooliganism that would have Brian Clough turning in his grave.

Who are these guys, the Lakers Casuals? They must meet in bars beforehand, sink two Buds and go cause a riot with ISO-friendly foam products. Pat Sharpe and the Fun House Crew would wipe the floor with this lot.

In a demented way all of this tiresome theatricism and exaggeration of the most mundane moments does make me yearn for the simpler times of casual violence, Bovril, jumpers for goalposts and muddy 3-2 battles on cold January afternoons. And that’s coming from a vegetarian whose sole combat experience of the last 20 years consists of clipping a camp youth around the ear. Joking aside, there’s a valid point; Americanising everything reduces it to a sanitised, family-friendly product void of any of the real-world excitement, danger, smells and sounds of the English version. We had something to be proud of but it’s completely gone at the top level – the atmosphere at even the best Premier League game today is totally stifled by the “family-friendly” ethos – and you need to drop down a few leagues to get a taste of what every ground used to be like. It’s a shame, but I’m sure it’s already too far down the line, too much money involved, to turn round from the American way.

america · basketball · football · ITV · Premier League · SKY