Video referee trials have begun in the PL, and England’s disgraceful links with Qatar revealed for what they are

By Tony Attwood

Blimey!  I say again, “blimey!”   I take the day off to go and see “Kinky Boots” – the wonderfully funny feel-good musical in the West End, and return to open the computer the next morning and find not just one, but two football stories that made me feel good.

One of the two tales is about something awful, I must admit, but it is used by the writer as way of attacking the UK’s appalling government policy on sport.  The other really makes me feel like maybe, just maybe, all the work by Untold’s writers on refereeing across the years has been really, really worth it.

The good coverage of an awful tale comes in the Guardian and is by Marina Hyde.  This is for me a real case of credit where it is due because I’ve been having a bash about the paper’s way of tackling football for a while.

But the piece “Welcome to the UK, ethically challenged butler to Qatar’s World Cup dreams” absolutely hits the nail where it should be thumped.

It all started with a tweet from  trade minister Greg Hands, in which he announced: “In Qatar to open our #SportIsGreat conference, supporting Qatar’s 2022 World Cup & offering UK to be the partner of choice for delivery.”

Ms Hyde then tells us that “Greg wrote an obsequious comment piece for the Peninsula, the Qatari English-language daily, in which he widened his focus to include all the 437 major athletic events to which the … sport-mad, is it? … autocracy has now acquired hosting rights.”

Now I won’t go on quoting line after line of the article, you can obviously read it yourself, but allow me, if you will, to give these snippets.

“Maybe democratically elected governments are, to quote a phrase, at the “back of the queue”. There is, of course, a rich precedent for this. In the arms sector, Britain has long operated an autocracies-first policy, with almost half our exports last year going to 21 of the Foreign Office’s 30 “human rights priority countries” – places where “the worst, or greatest number of, human rights violations take place”. So if we can live with that, I think we can make our peace with being the ethically challenged butler for the globally popular idea that is the Qatar World Cup.”

And a little later

“UK has marked itself out as keen to assist in Qatar’s creepy project to launder its reputation via the medium of sport. Because as almost everyone can see, that’s what’s going on here.”

In essence, if you have shared Untold’s dismay and disgust at the Qatar World Cup, do read the article.

But there is also something else that is hiding in all of this.  Something else that is rather close to my heart.

If you do drop by occasionally you will know of my persistent (and undoubtedly by now utterly boring) rants about the lack of evidence when writing about football.  Indeed it was the utter misuse of evidence that kicked off my complaints about the Guardian in the first place.  And you will have seen the correspondents here who when asked what evidence they have for some assertion about Arsene Wenger holding the club back, or Ozil nicking a living whatever, they say, “the evidence of my own eyes”.  To which I, of course reply, “that’s just like the evidence that the sun goes round the earth – because that’s what your eyes tell you.”

Well now we have the government doing the same.   Accused by the Leader of the Opposition in Parliament of not having a plan for getting the UK out of the EU the Prime Minister said words to the effect that “Of course we have a plan. Our plan is to get the best deal for Britain”.

It’s bad enough when football journalists do that sort of thing, but when the government uses it as its prime response, I get the feeling we are in real trouble.  Cozying up to the likes of Qatar via the medium of sport really does show where we have got to.

Anyway, moving on to the Telegraph.   And Walter, Andrew and Usama you might want to sit down before reading this one…

“Premier League begins conducting secret video technology trials”

Yep, it seems that week after week, month after month, year… well you get the rest… of banging on and on about the terribly low quality of refereeing in the Premier League, and of how in some matches one would get a more accurate response to events if one had a computer giving judgements on incidents at random, something might be happening.

You may well have noticed how we’ve really challenged the ultra secretive PGMO clique this season by publishing in depth referee reviews of Arsenal games, and cumulative week by week analyses of referee competence, and the effect it has on each club overall, plus reviews of all the major incidents in all the PL games each week, complete with video evidence.

Well, is it too much of a leap from that to say, this time we have finally pushed the appalling misleading and inept organisation that is destroying the very heart of football (with the connivance of the media I must add – including the Telegraph which once ran a couple of PGMO press releases as news), into a modicum of action?

Here’s what the Telegraph says…