On Saturday evening, with the score at 0-0 between Preston and Blackburn, a cross was played into the box and, to a casual observer, everyone in the stadium and referee Richard Jones, whose view was obscured, Blackburn’s Sammie Szmodics dived to head the ball off the underside of the bar and in. Thankfully, the assistant referee had noticed that Szmodics had used his outstretched arm and relayed the information to Jones.
What was most shocking about the incident was not the handball itself, but Szmodics’ subsequent behaviour. He complained bitterly to the referee, joined by his teammates. He acted with disbelief that the goal had been ruled out while the away end fumed raucously. It was a piece of astonishing gall, given what the replays immediately showed.
This isn’t really normal, is it? It’s one thing to try and seek an advantage by fooling an official, but quite another to keep up the act for show. The rules only allow for a yellow card to be awarded for the handball, but it seems faintly ludicrous that you get a red card for stopping a goal with your hand but only a yellow for scoring one. As for continuing that act, it is surely worthy of at least another yellow.
The incident lays bare the unfair lot of the referee and their assistants. It was a magnificent decision, but there will be no lingering appreciation for that. Get a decision right and it’s par for the course and on to the next controversy. Get one wrong and a set of supporters will remember your name, hold onto the grudge and probably scour the internet for your home town. Everything is slanted against you.
Clubs, managers and players have spent most of this season demanding that the standard of officiating improves; the refereeing outrage crisis has never felt more like an emergency. Presumably, they would also accept that if they can play a role in this improvement, they would choose to take it. So here’s a rogue, left-field suggestion that would immediately make difference: everyone could stop cheating?
There is a paradox here. We abhor cheating on an organisational level because it destroys the fabric of “fair” competition, undermines our ongoing trust in what we see and renders our investment – emotion, time, money – on what we have seen as a fallacy. And yet we don’t just readily accept cheating – we demand it.
At every throw-in and every corner, players from both teams urge the officials to call the decision their way. Fouls are committed and innocence routinely pleaded. In some of these incidents, there is a genuine cause for claim. In most of them, one of the parties knows that they are claiming for something undeserved.
Part of this is performative – players want to show supporters that it matters and claiming a decision (and arguing against that decision) is an easy way of currying favour. Part of it is a natural tendency – show me an elite sportsperson and I’ll show you a bad loser who believes that accepting a decision is a sign of weakness. But part of it is simply a desire to cheat, to pull the wool over the eyes of an official and seize an advantage in the process.
Clearly this is all, at least to some extent, moot. Footballers and football managers aren’t going to change because this behaviour is ingrained deep within them and within the sport. The refereeing crisis – if one even exists other than in the outrage that now runs roughshod – is a product of its environment.
But given that abuse and, at grassroots level, physical violence is on the rise and referees don’t seem to have a chance to plead their case over the deafening noise that now envelops them, it’s worth pointing out that nothing increases the risk of incorrect decisions being made more than the culture of cheating. And if we accept that it is an unshiftable part of the game, as we seem to, we are making a difficult job nigh on impossible.
from Football - inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/4k9jHMX
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