Football – yes the Beautiful Game and a sport that’s captivated me for many many years. I love football. It’s the lifeblood of the nation isn’t it? But cast your eye over the back pages of the redtops recently and there you will read about a catalogue of refereeing and officiating disasters…..red cards given unfairly, yellow cards given for no contact, goals wrongly allowed, goals wrongly disallowed and the offside rule re-interpreted.
Yes referees need eyes in the back of their heads. They are human and fallible and they miss things. So where is the technology we see in tennis or rugby? Why all the dragging of the feet? I blame FIFA first and the FA second. The FA won’t stand up to FIFA and FIFA are in the dark ages. It amused me that last time the FA advertised for a new Chief Executive they specified that a knowledge of football was not a requirement. Indeed it wasn’t, they ended up with someone from the Royal Mail and he had about as much luck organising the football as he’d had in getting the post delivered on time.
I passed the FA online exam in rules of the game so I know as much as some of the referees do – come on Football Association, give the refs a helping hand, bring in the necessary technology from August 2012 and do us all a favour. Oh while you’re at it, please bring in an appeals system for yellow cards as well as red cards and please put in an upper age limit for referees. Please stop kow towing to FIFA and help keep the beautiful game beautiful. The journos will still fill the back pages and we will still shout at the ref but justice will be done.
