Picture of PL ref’s obvious error leads to club director’s Twitter account being closed

 

 

 

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By Sir Hardly Anyone

This article is about a piece that appeared in The Messenger, an American news site founded by Jimmy Finkelstein, the former owner of  the news organization The Hill based in Washington in the United States, which was described by the Library of Congress, as a “non-partisan newspaper for and about Congress, breaking stories from Capitol Hill, K Street, and the White House.”

And this article in The Messenger, is particularly interesting for those of us who feel that traditional UK media tends to block out certain football stories that don’t fit with their ideology and their own view of what stories are acceptable to the powers that be within football.

What makes me mention this today, is the headline in the Messenger, which I have not seen reflected in any English media that reads “JJ Watt Locked Off of X After Calling Out Premier League Officials For Missing ‘Blatant Foul’.” 

Now JJ Watt is a minority shareholder in Burnley FC. and he wrote a brief note on Twitter (also known as X) saying he was not happy about a refereeing decision in the game between Burnley and Luton Town which ended 1-1 on Friday.

What he then found was that his Twitter (X) account was then locked so that the video he posted showing a Luton Town player crash into the Burnley goal keeper, (which then allowed the ball to go into the end in the 93rd minute) thus resulting in a draw,) could not be seen.

Less than 30 minutes later, Watt posted that his account had been locked, saying “that was quick” with a crying laughing emoji.   However Burnley fans then quite reasonably and rightly reposted the clip of the event, and Watt then reposted some of these.  And I say “rightly” because it was a real event.  It happened – and in this country (even if nowhere else) we do not cut out events from the past, just because they might be awkward.   Or at least we shouldn’t do that.

Now I have often argued that the only possible explanation for the failure of the media in the UK to criticise anything that PGMO does has to be that PGMO has demanded this of the media in return for their right to press passes for matches.  The same sort of deal, I would suggest, is in place in regard to TV rights.  If a company does not agree to PGMO terms, I argue, then it cannot have a place in the press box, access to players and access to sanctioned videos, photographs and so on.

I have also admitted that I don’t have evidence to support this contention – I merely say it is the only reason I can think of why the media will not engage in discussions about referees at all.  The action described above, heightens that view.

The closure of a club director’s Twitter account because he has criticised a referee seems to me an extraordinary and utterly unacceptable move, and totally against the concept of freedom of expression that I thought social media was there to allow.

After all, the club director was not in any way saying that the referee was deliberately biased, or that he had been bribed or any other accusation of that sort.  He is saying that on this occasion the referee made a major blunder that was fairly obvious and rather hard to understand.   And for that comment, his Twitter account was shut.

Now Twitter accounts don’t get shut unless someone makes a demand that this should happen, and so that brings us to the point of, “who made this demand?”  We can of course only guess.  But it would have to be someone who had a vested interest in not allowing the suggestion that the referee had made a total blunder, and PGMO had the power to demand that Twitter obeyed this demand.

But we might also return to my opening thought that the “traditional media tends to block out certain stories that don’t fit with their ideology” – and there can be no doubt that the ideology of TV and broadcasters in the UK is that referees are not to be criticised.

Which then takes us back to the question: why, in a competitive market of broadcasters and writers, would all of the commercial outlets agree never to tackle any question relating to referee incompetence or bias, or each other’s refusal to discuss it?  Indeed even the fact that PGMO has no website, and that unlike in Germany, referees do not give post-match interviews, is simply not mentioned.

That may not convince you that anything is wrong, but it certainly has me thinking.

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