These referee errors are there for all to see but it is how they are reported that is of greatest interest

By Tony Attwood

Yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook was asked by Senator Orrin Hatch (Republican Utah) about the financial model behind Facebook.   On all the reports I have seen and heard including on the financial news section of the BBC’s highly rated morning news programme on Radio 4, what was broadcast was the clip of the Senator asking how Facebook makes money, and Zuckerberg’s reply, “we sell adverts.”

Snigger snigger, silly old buffer of a senator not knowing that.  Ha ha.

But in fact there was a more to it than this.  In fact senators outlined the dangers and drawbacks of running a free service that collects user data which is then sold by Facebook to advertisers to target people.  That was completely omitted by Zuckerberg, and not picked up by the media.  No wonder Facebook shares rose at such speed.  With the help of naff reporting they have just got away with murder.

I mention this because this is the same approach as the British newspapers use with football, by cutting out segments of valid information and feeding individual snippets to back up their own generalised model of what is happening.

Take the Telegraph with its referee rating of the ref in the Manchester City game.  They gave Antonio Mateu Lahoz three out of ten.

So question one: why does the Telegraph only do this for a European game – and even then not every European game? Why not for PL games?  (I suspect the PGMO have it as a no-go area in their contract with the League, who pass it on to accredited reporters).

They then write,

“Pep Guardiola harboured doubts beforehand about the eccentric Spanish official and they will only have been reinforced after a lousy display.”

OK.  Eccentric.  Lousy.  Ever seen the Telegraph say that about a PGMO member of staff?  Or is it that these foreigners have never learned the rules of the game, and just simply “don’t understand” – that last desperate port of call for the person who has run out of arguments.  “You don’t understand!”  I recall my teenage daughters telling me that.  Quite a lot actually.

 

But oh, now look.  Guardiola knew about the man beforehand…

“The City manager admitted he had warned his players beforehand about Lahoz amid concern that the referee had been put in charge of the game.”  How funny that this never happens with Arsenal games.  We expressed serious concern about the ability of the referee in Arsenal’s game before the match last Sunday – but of course no newspaper did.  We were proven to be right – one of his major decisions was overturned within 24 hours of the appeal.

The Guardian took a broader view saying,

“Two billion pounds, 10 years and an entire Gulf state marketing plan in the making, in the end Manchester City’s best shot so far at becoming the champions of Europe was extinguished in half an hour of tailspin at Anfield and the reverberations from two minutes of self-immolating fury from Pep Guardiola at the Etihad.”   They clearly don’t want to mention the ref.  They continue…

“It’s different when [Mo] Salah’s goal at Anfield is offside,” Guardiola said. “It’s different when Gabriel Jesus’ goal at Anfield is offside. It’s a penalty for Raheem Sterling from Andy Robertson in front of the fourth official. Of course they have an influence.”

To which the Guardian replies that PG was “like a man directing three lanes of traffic while also yanking the choke on his petrol mower”.   OK, very droll, but it doesn’t answer the poiint.

Indeed they suddenly have moved him to being a serial loser for “it is now seven years since Guardiola, the super-coach, made it past the semi-finals.   Since then Guardiola’s record is ordinary, with 13 wins in 30 knockout games across three financially incontinent superclubs. In semi-finals his teams have shipped 16 goals in eight matches.”

They didn’t go back to Barcelona v PSG  on this occasion, but they could have done.  Strange things happen in football matches when you let referees do it their way.  The ceaseless denial by the media that this is so is making their coverage of football increasingly irrelevant.

Meanwhile Man City have now lost five games in their last ten, a statistic that we were very recently reporting about Arsenal.  Odd that.

Date	Game	Res	Score	Competition
19 Feb 2018	Wigan Athletic v Manchester City	L	1-0	FA Cup
25 Feb 2018	Arsenal v Manchester City	W	0-3	League Cup
01 Mar 2018	Arsenal v Manchester City	W	0-3	Premier League
04 Mar 2018	Manchester City v Chelsea	W	1-0	Premier League
07 Mar 2018	Manchester City v FC Basel	L	1-2	Champions League
12 Mar 2018	Stoke City v Manchester City	W	0-2	Premier League
31 Mar 2018	Everton v Manchester City	W	1-3	Premier League
04 Apr 2018	Liverpool v Manchester City	L	3-0	Champions League
07 Apr 2018	Manchester City v Manchester United	L	2-3	Premier League
10 Apr 2018	Manchester City v Liverpool	L	1-2	UEFA Champions League

Man City will of course win the league, and the sort of problems they had with the referee in the Champions League game yesterday will quickly be a thing of the past – at least for the media which appears to have a memory span rather less than that of a fungus gnat.

And that is a major part of the problem.  A sense of history does not seem to be part of the requirement of commenting on football these days. Nor does a sense of reality.

As for investigative journalism.  Well, I guess that is just down to us, and it is slow and incomplete because our resources are, to say the least, modest.

But at least we try.

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