Manchester United - Chelsea

This was a bad game for officials for two reasons:  1- This is just about the biggest game in the premiership given that one of these sides has won the league for 7 years now.  2 – There were numerous incorrect decisions which hugely affected the outcome of the game.

 The first of these was the first goal, scored by Chris Smalling. It was clearly offside. Not by loads, but enough that it took one glance at a replay to be 100% sure. This would have taken a video ref a few seconds to decide. Interestingly, I can’t help but feel the linesman should have spotted this himself. When a free kick is being taken in this position, the linesman has plenty of time to position himself appropriately and watch carefully for players straying offside at the moment the free kick is taken. This is probably his primary job at such a time. He can be forgiven for failing to spot an outstretched leg of one player perhaps but Smalling’s whole body was roughly a yard offside. A really poor decision by the linesman.

The second goal, which was a beauty scored by Nani was also offside. This time he was stood practically right next to the linesman, several yards offside when a crossfield ball was driven to him. He collected the ball in an onside position and then skinned someone and smashed it in the top corner from 25 yards. That he gained no obvious advantage from being offside here is beside the point. Again he was clearly offside and one would expect a linesman to make this relatively simple call. Already the game had been ruined by bad decisions (at least for Chelsea).

The penalty that Man U received in the second half was controversial too. It wasn’t clear cut but the defender got a good piece of the ball. There is an argument that he made contact with the player first but in my opinion, and in this case it is merely that, this was a great challenge and not a penalty. This would have been a tough situation for the use of VT to improve as Man U would still have had a chance of scoring had the penalty not been given. If the ref had given it and an appeal system was in place, it would have been unfair for the penalty to not be given as Man U would have suffered from not being allowed to play on in a promising situation. The obvious conclusion would be that such situations, where it was not obvious whether a penalty should be given should be allowed to play out by the ref and then for himself or Man U to refer to a replay in the event of a goal not having been scored (by Man U) by the next time play was stopped. In the end Rooney slipped and the penalty did not result in a goal anyway but with the dubious decision going the way of Man U on top of the first two offside goals described above added to Chelsea’s frustration at the decisions they received on the day.

The fourth controversy I’d like to mention was the Ashley Cole tackle on Hernandez which resulted in a yellow card but no penalty. It certainly wasn’t a penalty as many claimed because the ball was comfortably out of play by the time Cole made contact with Hernandez. Alex Ferguson felt it should have been a red card and was not alone in taking this stance. This view is more persuasive given that Hernadez was injured by the tackle but it was clear to me that Cole was attempting to block a shot and would probably have done so had the shot been on target. For this reason, a yellow card is arguably fair. However, whenever a player is injured by a tackle in which the culprit has left the floor and ‘dived in’ it can usually be deemed dangerous play and legitimately deemed a red card offence. For me, the fact that there are arguments for both a yellow or red card means I am happy to accept the ref’s judgement on this and say no mistake was made here. A video replay could not have altered a decision like this in my opinion as this would have to require convincing evidence that the original decision was wrong.

Tottenham - Liverpool

The Liverpool – Spurs game was not the most controversial of the weekend but certainly had its moments. Watching the game, it was clear from an early stage that the referee was ‘card-happy’. He seemed to be booking every foul at the start.

One of the crucial yellow cards he gave out in the opening exchanges was to Charlie Adam. It wasn’t an outrageous decision but seemed very harsh to me. It occurred in the middle of the pitch and out wide and was not preventative of a counter attack or overtly cynical. It was a straight-forward shirt pull. Whilst some may like to see the day when every shirt pull is cautioned because it might help cut it out of the game, it would only be fair to let the clubs know of this before implementing it because it certainly hasn’t been the case up to now. For me, this incident did not warrant a yellow card and I thought it was poor refereeing. However, this is discretional and could not be improved by video appeals or such like so I’m happy to say this was not an out-and-out mistake.

Charlie Adam was soon shown a second yellow for a shocking tackle on the edge of the Liverpool box and sent from the field of play. Personally, I felt this was clearly a straight red card. He went in carelessly and aggressively and made contact with Scott Parker high on his leg, close to the knee. It was extremely dangerous and Parker was lucky not to suffer injury as a result. So, in these incidents the ref gave two bookings when I felt he should have given a foul with no card and then a red card for the second one. In this case, you could say two wrongs made a right although there are subtleties which mean this is not the case and anyhow, it was more by luck than judgement.

Skrtel was later sent off for two yellow cards of his own, which were not particularly controversial although I felt the first one was a little harsh. It seemed as though Gareth Bale made an effort to get him booked for a relatively ordinary foul, a skill he has become rather good at recently. Having said that, I would not have seen fit to change that decision given sufficient replays as a video referee.

The last incident I would like to mention briefly in this game was the booking of Luis Suarez for sarcastically applauding a decision. This seems to be widely accepted as fair but I have to say I disagree with this interpretation of the law. Nearly every decision is disputed on the pitch at the time. If a player feels the decision was wrong he always communicates this in some way to the ref. I fail to see how Suarez was doing anything fundamentally different from saying “You’ve got that wrong referee” and his chosen method of communicating this is even more justifiable when you consider he barely speaks English. Even if this decision was technically correct (which I doubt) it certainly isn’t consistent with the refereeing we usually see when players like Wayne Rooney and Craig Bellamy express their distaste for a call going against them in their particular styles.

The End Of Another Predictable Season

The latter stages of this season have been mightily predictable. Arsenal's season collapses, City take Spurs’ place in the Champions league, United win the league comfortably, Barca beat Real, United beat Shalke, Barca beat United. The only slight shock being City beating United in the cup semi. Then, the final was a foregone conclusion. And even the graduated but assured ascent of Man City is, in itself, a thing of tedious inevitability.

The thing I would like to discuss is the cause of this predictability, at least for my money. I speak, of course, of the organising bodies running the game (or do I mean ruining?)(Yes actually, I do). For me, a well run team sport has provisions ensuring that no single team can monopolise it. Of course, no single team has quite been able to do this in football. For example, that no-one has retained the champions league is evidence to this end. However, how many teams are there who can win it? And How many can win the Premiership? However many, it is not enough. In an ideal world, everyone who is in it could win it. This may seem utopian but “Aim for the stars, you might reach the moon”.

If you look at the American sports, how predictable are they? ‘Nowhere near as much as football’ is a pretty good answer. Yes, some teams are better than others but realistically, very few teams can be ruled out from the start, and that gives every fan hope that this may be their year. The top-flight of English football used to be this way too. So what's different? Well, it's impossible to avoid mentioning money so let's get it out of the way.

All the American sports have systems in place to help prevent a team using extortionate wealth to commandeer an insurmountable monopoly in their sport. These include, not exclusively: salary caps, salary floors, luxury tax and revenue sharing. None of them are perfect but they all have their impact. Of course, all American sports have the draft system too; a system which cannot serve as precedent in European football whose system also contains promotion and relegation which, ironically, is justifiable wholly in the interests of fairness. The important point is that, the governing bodies have, by some sequence of events or another, arrived at the conclusion that rules and regulations need be made preventing the aforementioned monopoly. And they are constantly reconsidered, evaluated and updated and serve sufficiently to retain a realistic sense of hope in the mind of fans of even the poorest franchises.

Would we like to see European football Americanised in this way? Possibly not. But I have spoken before about the significant lack of innovation in the governing of football. And the reason this passes without consequence is that, until now, football remains unconditionally popular – a fact which is not in anyone’s interests to change. But if it’s popularity is truly unconditional, and I believe it is, then innovation would not be a danger to this either. So why not? Why not try bringing in video technology? Why not make referees more accountable? Why not try to implement financial restrictions? Why not try rule changes in the most controversial areas of the game? - offside, last man red-cards (more accurately, goal-scoring opportunity denying red cards), ‘deliberate’ handball, etc. etc. These questions become increasingly rhetorical in the safe knowledge of being able to change and even reverse any innovative rule-changes which are proven not to work or help.

The financial restrictions are surely the first thing to be addressed. Isolated injustices in individual games are considerably more tolerable, and for that matter unpreventable, compared with the predictability of a sport which makes no attempt to prevent monopolisation. So, it is with all this in mind that I very much approve of the imminent financial fairplay laws to which the reader is almost unquestionably referring. Whilst it is true that those clubs effected are working tirelessly to evasively circumnavigate this rule, it is a huge step forward for the sport to implement regulations recognising the need for restriction in this regard.

In the meantime, are we to sit and watch, without comment or condemnation, this sport spiral further away from that which makes it great with big season-defining games unfolding as if scripted by Blatter, Platini or some equally unimaginative and decrepit crook? I doubt that can be expected with any probabilistic conviction.

The current place of the speculative fan, interested in the tout ensemble, is to criticise the game and not the players, managers, fans or officials, or even owners. It is, after all, no surprise that a sport whose governance is as fraudulent as it is backward, is falling behind the rest of the world of sport in all manner of capacities. And its natural defences, its popularity, will not necessarily outlast an ever-decaying system of conservatism and corruption.