I've been horrified by recent attempts by referees, inspired by Herr Blatter's view of the game, to take honest, physical tackles out of the game whilst apparently being unable or unwilling to root out the corrosive cheating that's rife in the modern game through diving, feigning injury, gross time wasting and blocking, holding & pulling at opponents when miles away from the ball. This then is an interesting article. Personally, I think the last thing we want is more rules: quite the reverse, we want referees to be given the discretion to judge what is genuinely dangerous or deliberately cynical. http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/football/17130725 And don't get me started on the quite ludicrous handball decisions that are being handed out. Unless we can breed players with arms that stop at the shoulder, there will always be contact between ball & arm. Mr Blatter's own rules say that a free kick is given if "a player ..... handles the ball deliberately". We've got a long long way away from that.
For a sport that has been around for over 150 years you wonder what can be new in football.........but week after week we have referees judging situations, what to the spectators, seem different to what was witnessed by them the previous week. notDistant I agree with you that the handball situations is ludicrous........do we need to breed referees with the ability to determine ( in an instant) what is a diliberate hand ball or not. My pet moan is did the ball cross the goal line or not......this is so easy to put right.........tennis can decide accurately if a ball is in or outside a line quite easily.....even if it's travelling at a hundred miles an hour. Technology can deal quite easily with such a simple decision.......although in the Word Cup Frank Lampard could be excused from thinking that all match officials in charge of the game against Germany were totally blind or wearing blindfolds at that moment. When you consider that thousands in the ground could see the ball was so far in that it nearly hit the netting......add to that the millions all over the world who new that a goal had been scored through TV and the mind boggles that the three match officials one on the pitch and two running the line did not know that a goal had been legally scored.........although if the referee says no than it's not legal.......work that out if you can. Rugby has proven how hard it can be to confirm a try......but generally with slo-mo they can find an angle that confirms one way or the other.......if they can do that with half a dozen 18 st men laying on the ball........football goal line technology should be a doddle.......it's not as if the ball is required to touch the ground.......penalty area technology as well.......was the foul tackle inside or outside the box.
I'm not a great believer in technology when life with a Ref with eyes and two assistants has been good enough for years. The problem is that at top matches now there are so many cameras that if you look at one and it doesn't show something you want it to then you can go around the ground and find one that makes something look either good or bad depending on where you are trying to come from. Referees will always make mistakes because they are human after all. Some might not agree they are but that is another argument. You have to accept some errors including with judgement. The players of course are agrieved when a decision goes against them following an opponent's theatricals then 5 minutes later are rolling around following a double salko of their own. Sport is meant to be played in a fair and sportsman like manner but in football it is the sportsmen who cause most of the problems for the officials. I hate cheating of any kind even when it is one of my own who is doing it. It has gotten so bad now that hardly anyone dare do anything lest it ends in a card of some description. Football isn't actually a contact sport although there is bound to be some during a match. The players themselves have caused the confusion for officials because of their simulations. They can hardly now complain if Refs get it wrong. Handball is now quite rediculous as has been said. A ball travelling at a rate of knots from 5 yards away is hard to get out of the way of. If you try to block then automatically your arms go up. That's the laws of nature rather than anything else like it is difficult to jump without raising arms. It is all getting rather silly but again it is only the players and managers who are to blame for it. You have managers critcising Refs for not giving a handball that is shown in replay in ultra slow motion making it look deliberate. You have managers on the side lines waving their fingers in the air in card brandishing simulation. This could be stopped without too much problem by banning managers from the ground for the next match if caught in view doing it along with players on the pitch who do the same. There is one official who is the Ref, any other officiating is discent in my view. They look at incidents of off the ball contact after the game and ban players who are proved to have elbowed or something similar when nobody is supposedly looking. They should have a look at tackles where a player does a triple sommersault and it is proved after than he was not touched with the result being the same, a ban. Until FIFA or the FA or whoever can change these things take steps to do something rather than just pay lip service to complaints and then do nothing then it won't change.
I certainly wouldn't disagree with what Sensible says about cheating [and let's call it just that, not "simulation" or some other anodyne euphemism] by players making life hard for referees. But in the case of tackling and handball, the situation isn't that referees are making repeated mistakes. The fact is they are CORRECTLY following instructions they've been given by the authorities under the duress of assessors marking down refs who dare to use their own judgement. It's the instructions that are wrong and in the case of tackling, it goes all the way back to Herr Blatter who stated a couple of years ago that contact tackles had to be taken out of the game. On whose authority and with whose agreement did he say that by the way? I accept that our international teams run the risk of multiple cards if they work to different standards to other countries but I'd prefer that to our domestic game being reduced to something akin to ballet on grass. On diving and the other dishonesty, I do blame the refs. The rules are [mostly] there for them to apply but they are too craven hearted to do it. I see 3 or 4 clear instances at least of cheating in most English games AT NORMAL SPEED but the refs are uniformly blind to it. A good case [albeit European] was the Man U v Ajax game last night. Raphael blatantly fell over in the Ajax penalty box in the first half. No freekick was given, so the ref got that right, but was Raphael even spoken to? You bet he wasn't.
