- Why Arsenal didn’t mind losing and where they’d be without VAR
- Arsenal’s inferiority complex: if we did have one, it’s now long since gone
By Tony Attwood
If there are two concepts that define the current state of English football they are surely the eternal statements of excellence and the eternal special pleading.
As an example of the second, consider the fact that Pep Guardiola has apparently asked for an extension of the League’s summer break to fit in with their desire to play another money-spinning summer tournament. It appears the League has for once said no (for now at least).
As for the League itself, it has recently declared that “the world looks up to English officials as a model they would like to follow”.
That actually may be true, since the League is in total denial of the problem it has with referee bias, or what the Chief Football Officer of the League, Tony Scholes, likes to call “officiating errors”.
Now we know that of late Michael Oliver has received death threats and that of course is utterly and completely unacceptable. But it is surely worth wondering why this is happening, and what can be done other than have headlines like “Time to blow the whistle on abuse” which probably has had zero effect.
The point is that there is abuse of referees, and simply saying it has to stop, is not good enough. There should be a serious consideration of what is wrong, and then an answer as to what the League is doing about it. Then, if that seems like too big a task, it can be broken down for the League into two simple starting points.
First stop referees from seeing the same clubs over and over again, and instead limit the number of times a referee can oversee each club in the League to twice a season: once at home and once away.
Second, recognise and publicise the fact that there are some referees who rarely see away wins, while others see lots of away wins, and then start a clear publicised campaign to ensure that these different biases are significantly reduced, so that clubs don’t get advantages from specific referees.
However, as matters stand, all such subjects are barred from public debate. The media won’t take up any such point, and the PGMO has no website on which the issues could be raised.
Instead of any of this acknowledgement of the serious faults in refereeing that even a casual analysis of referee results reveals, what we get are endless statements that “other leagues around the world,” where, we are told (without any evidence being provided, “they all look up to the match officials in this country and indeed the VAR process and VAR officials in this country as a model that they would like to follow.”
And yes of course they would like to follow this country because in the Premier League referees can show consistent result bias, and yet get away with it. It is the sort of situation clubs with money in any country would love to have.
It is also interesting that there is no mention of the utterly different approach in Germany where referees appear on TV after games, to be interviewed about the match. In England, in contrast, the referee has a specific car and driver to escort him from the ground and the referee is fined if he deviates from the plan.
We have even had radio commentators removed from their jobs because of their daring to criticise PGMO. And one has to ask why, if everything is fine, are PGMO a) so secretive and b) so afraid of commentary.
Wrose again, even when PGMO does make wretched errors and recognise the fact (as with the issue of the implementation of VAR being “nowhere near good enough,”) no one dares ask, “How was this disaster allowed to happen?” Instead, it is just taken as something that does happen, and there is a vague promise to make it right in the end.
Indeed the announcement that “the number of VAR errors has gone down substantially from 20 to 13” is given as a triumph, rather than an admission of failure.
But above all, no one dares comment on the fact that (for example) David Coote has been giving out yellow cards this season at a rate that is 66% higher than that of Sam Barrott having each overseen 15 ot 16 games this season.
And then again Coote blows for 23% more fouls than Barrott. So Coote does perceive more fouls than Barrott, but even that is nowhere near enough more to explain his 66% greater likelihood of waving a card.
On top of this, we have the fact that Robert Jones has seen 63.6% of his games as home wins while for Paul Tierney, the figure is just 36% of his games. Darren England has seen 8.3% of his games as away wins, while Jarred Gillett has seen 42.9% of his games as away wins! That’s a 500% difference! It’s bonkers.
Of course I am not saying that these figures should be equal for all refs, but variations this big mean that something very, very odd is happening, and it is being very carefully avoided by the media, and of course PGMO.
And all I ask is “Why?”.
