On Sunday, Fulham’s manager Marco Silva was sent off and Aleksandar Mitrovic shoved referee Chris Kavanagh. On Saturday, Wolves had a player sent off for dissent and manager Julen Loptegui suggested that there was a plot against his club: “Maybe when you have the same mistakes a lot of times against you, it’s not balanced.”
On Friday, Nottingham Forest’s official Instagram account blew up a still image from a vaguely questionable refereeing decision with the caption “A crucial decision in a crucial match – and we’ve been badly let down again by the wrong call”.
The common consensus is that refereeing standards have never been lower, and so every club, manager and player is in part vindicated because they are simply pushing for better.
The basic premise is almost uncertainly untrue, but let’s run with it and have a little quiz question: do you think those standards are likely to improve by accusing referees of bias, of jumping upon every incident to cry foul and to get physical with referees – yes or no?
To anyone answering yes, believing that beating officials with a massive stick to provoke extreme hunger for the carrot, go and spend a few weeks in grassroots football and see if the same approach works there.
That paranoia and outrage has always laid deep within the psyche of some football supporters (and maybe some managers too), but it has gone mainstream this season. In part it must be because anger is the easiest emotion to reach for when in need of self-preservation and deflection and the impacts of success and failure, relegation and survival have never been greater.
Was it the shirt pull on Adama Traore that cost Wolves this weekend, or their inability to mark Leeds’ players in the box? Did the image that Forest blew up for Instagram show the crucial moment, or were they outplayed for long periods?
Decisions by officials are the perfect target because managers and clubs know that they will find a receptive audience who shares their desperation.
Anger also appears to cumulate in a way we have not quite seen before. The strangest aspect of Fulham’s meltdown on Sunday was that the decision that provoked it was absolutely correct and clearcut. Fulham’s players and manager were instead reacting to a build-up of resentment, a pursuit that is now commonplace.
That now also extends across multiple matches: Wolves and Forest have both made complaints to PGMOL about a series of decisions that they believe have gone against them. They are desperately poor witnesses. Neither Wolves nor Forest mentioned the potential penalty award and disallowed goal that went in their favour respectively this weekend.
(Not that it really matters here, but these long laments of perceived injustice at the hands of referees are almost certainly counterproductive. Not only could they subconsciously deflect focus from the issues that might well be hampering performance, both in-game and between games, but they also create a psychological mindset that the world is conspiring against you that can easily become self-fulfilling).
But now it is not enough to cry about incompetence from those whose jobs have never been made as hard. On social media, accusations of outright incompetence have warped into widespread allegations of corruption. It apparently does not matter that those accusations come from supporters of every club, including both Wolves and Leeds fans after their game on Saturday.
There is no more reasonable discourse because the battle has been lost. Officials are now seen as fair game and abusing them has become a sport within a sport.
The obvious response to this behaviour is to take a zero-tolerance approach to dissent. Swear at an official, you’re off. Intimidate them physically or put your hands on them and receive a significant ban. But that’s a mighty difficult strategy to implement in the current climate. It would only invite further scrutiny of those incidents, the mania that greets each one and likely only increase the torrent of abuse they receive.
The impact of VAR cannot be underestimated in aggravating the problem. Most decisions made by football referees in real-time are, in at least one aspect, subjective: how much contact was there? Did the player make the most of the contact? Was the contact deliberate, accidental or incidental? Wherever you have subjectivity, controversy is potentially birthed if you seek to become a midwife.
Before VAR, we at least saved the over-analysis of those decisions until a television studio after the match. But with VAR mis-sold as a solution, life as a referee became instantly harder. By replaying those calls on repeat, the innate subjectivity of decisions was highlighted more than it was removed.
“All we want is consistency,” someone shouts from the back of the room. Consistency will never exist because human beings aren’t consistent and subjectivity rarely is either. And yet we have become obsessed by reaching this impossible goal and berating those who fail to match up to it.
We can do little about the outrage of supporters. Alleging that a referee is corrupt may well be libellous, but you cannot hope to charge every person on social media who lets off steam by doing so. You also cannot change the mind of a conspiracy theorist. If you honestly believe that there is a secret cabal plotting the relegation of your club then you’ve probably a) overestimated the amount your club matters in the wider context of the game, and b) aren’t going to listen to reason.
But managers, clubs and the media must do better because, unlike individual supporters, they have a tacitly accepted responsibility to avoid exacerbating the abuse culture that will soon cause cracks in the game they call home. They may like to believe that the professional game (and its officials) exist in their own bubble – they don’t.
Almost a third of grassroots referees surveyed for a recent BBC Sport investigation had been subjected to physical abuse and roughly the same percentage said that verbal abuse affected their mental health, making them less likely to continue. We will soon run out and nobody is listening because nobody seems to care enough.
The only way this situation improves is if we all improve; it starts with acceptance and maturity. A decision went against you? Take it (and remember the ones that went for you). Feel you’ve been cheated? Perhaps wonder whether the partisanship may lie within you rather than officials. Want to prove that you love your football club? Great – but you don’t need to become an amateur sleuth who bases their entire personality around defending its name.
from Football - inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/B6am3if
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