The People's Forum: I’d start with them being consistent in the same game

Never mind different refs seeing different things.
Not saying it isn’t hard, but to give/not give on 2 things the same - which we all see often - just isn’t right?

Previous Message

But you know as well as I do Jez that if you get 100 referees in a room, all qualified, all trained, all experienced and showed them a number of clips, you wouldn’t get all agree on every clip and it’s outcome…. It’s far far far too subjective but when they try and make it black and white then it doesn’t work either.

It’s just one of those things we have to accept, it’s not solvable and the sooner people realise and sooner the officials are treated in a similar way they are in top flight rugby, the sooner there is an opportunity for more referees to come through and be encouraged to take it up and lead to a bigger selection pool in the future.

Not enough refs going in to the system means a weaker pool to select the elite from over the next 5/10/20 years and so we end up with referees who are poor but are the best of what’s available and it’s that pool of availability that is the problem that won’t be solved by letting the game eat itself alive the way it is now.

Ste

Previous Message

Anthony Taylor, who I dont rate by the way

He does Liverpool v Man City and lets them kick 7 lumps out of each other and was praised for it

He then comes to ref Everton v Aston Villa and every single shirt pull, push, tackle was penalised

Its fair enough reffing at my level almost to a different standard ie I ref an u8 game differently to an open age game but these are all EPL games

And now that they are professionals, the consistency should have improved
They should see certain clips and make sure they agree on the correct decision

Previous Message

In terms of so many decisions being subjective and open to an individuals own perspective, what I think is reckless you might not for example so we will never have consistency unless every match is refereed by the same referee.

In terms of the "intervene little sometimes, stronger other times" I think has been taken out of context.

As an example, if there has been a bad tackle in a game, players get heated up, for the next 5-10 mins I might then give more fouls for "soft" fouls than I would normally, this slows the games down and breaks up passages of play that then allows everyone to calm down a bit and get back to a "normal" level. This is game management and has to be done, regardless of your interpretations of fouls, you're not deliberately ignoring the laws you are just amending your interpretation of things that are open to subjective interpretation and that are happening on the pitch to be more or less strict.

The Clattenburg comments are a whole different level, there is a significant difference between giving a soft push on the half way line to calm the game down and awarding a penalty to even things up!

Ste

Previous Message

The constant (apparent) throwaways like talking about the toys in England's car, or how he had to get home to go to a bonfire night party, or pick up burger buns for the kids etc...all of that is very deliberately included to remind us that referees are people, just like you and me. And it is important to humanise referees, to recognise that they're as fallible as we all are, as frustrating as it is when they get things wrong (as they inevitably do).

What I did raise an eyebrow at was the admission that they're not looking to apply the laws consistently across games, however ("Sometimes the referee will try to intervene as little as possible; in other matches a stronger line might be required. England [referred to] a category of decisions beyond just right and wrong - "wrong that's right for the game""). The Clattenburg admission that he gave a "soft penalty" to "even things out in the minds of the players [so that] they would be easier to control after that" is quite something.

But yeah, this might as well as have been written by the PGMOL press office. To have the level of access that the journalist did means there would have to have been approval from the top of the chain, which would only come with agreement to review the piece before publication and - at least implicit - direction on what they were hoping to achieve. Again, not to say that everything here is therefore worthless (it's certainly not, and there are some excellent reminders and insights that help to better communicate how and why officials operate as they do), but this was a long way from objectively answering the question as to whether it's "fair" to say that referees are getting worse each season (which is how the article is bylined).