BfB

After defeat at The City Ground Colin Todd said he had no ‘qualms with the sending off whatsoever’ and was ‘not blaming the referee for us losing’. He was also quoted as saying ‘but we had six players booked and one sent off and I didn’t think it was that type of game’. In total these hardly seem like the rants of an unreasonable man. For the sake of completeness Forest also had three players booked, so ten bookings for not ‘that type of game’ is quite something. When did you last see ten bookings in a match for any type of game?

Could this have anything to do with the referee? Silly question, you may think, until you look at the F.A’s website. Remember the game was played on 29th October and the referee was Mr G.K. Hegley. According to a piece on the F.A’s website dated 26th October, ‘Following a meeting of the FA Referees Committee this week, referee Grant Hegley has been suspended for 14 days. Hegley was charged with less than proficiently applying the Laws of the Game after failing to send off Sheffield United’s Keith Gillespie after the final whistle of the match against Reading on 1 October.’

The first and perhaps most obvious question is ‘Are there two Mr Hegley’s?’ Can we perhaps assume not, especially since the man in the picture on the F.A. website would seem to be bear more than just a passing resemblance to the man in the middle at The City Ground.

So let’s look at the next question, namely ‘When is a suspension not a suspension?’ The answer might appear to be ‘When it’s for a referee.’ Just when did Mr Hegley’s suspension begin and end? He obviously wasn’t suspended three days after the date of the piece on the F.A’s website. Perhaps he was wearing a tag and was allowed out early.

So, assuming as we might that it was the same Mr H and that his suspension hadn’t taken effect three days later, can we find an explanation for the flood of cards (Darren Holloway’s excepted) that baffled Colin Todd? Look again at why Mr H was suspended – for not sending off Keith Gillespie. It may be recalled that Gillespie’s grouse at the end of the match was to do with a penalty or, rather, the absence of a penalty. I’ve only seen it on the TV two or three times and in slow motion, but I’d love to hear why Mr H didn’t give a penalty. At the end of the game Gillespie was joined by his manager in ‘an exchange of words’ with the referee, for which Gillespie should, it seems, have been red carded and Neil Warnock faces a disciplinary hearing. It was the same game where Paddy Kenny could rather easily have been sent off (compare that poor chap Flitney from Barnet) for denying a goal-scoring opportunity by handling the ball outside his area, only to be rescued by Mr H’s apparent view that the ball was going wide. Even Neil Warnock was quoted as saying ‘I thought he was gong to get sent off straight away.’

What we have, then, on 1st October is a referee accused by managers of being slow to give fouls and red cards, found guilty on 25th October of ‘less than proficiently applying the Laws of the Game’ and then on 29th October applying the same Laws to our game in such a manner that he brought out his yellow card no fewer than ten times.

Let us also remember the severe limits on appeals against cards, limits which seem to be based on the perceived need to preserve the omniscience of referees as far as possible. We need go no further back than Dean Windass’ statement that Mark Clattenburg, the Premiership ref who booked Deano at Doncaster, ‘admitted to me afterwards that he had got it wrong, but unfortunately he cannot do anything about it now.’ The suggestion is that refs can’t be seen to make mistakes, which is one way of saying that they can’t be seen to be human. Well, they may not all have fathers, but they are, so far as I know, all human.

So City cannot appeal any of Mr Hegley’s yellow cards or the £2500 fine we would have avoided if even one or two could be overturned. Mr H has come off a disciplinary for not proficiently applying the Laws by being too lenient and has jogged straight into a game where no one could accuse him of being too lenient. Wouldn’t it have been better to have started his suspension immediately, as would have happened with a player sent off or disciplined before a similar F.A. committee? Isn’t it only too human to react to an accusation of leniency by being just the opposite? Could none of this have been foreseen by the F.A? Ah, but to get an admission out of the F.A. might not allowed either. And we don’t really know that they are human, do we?

And a ‘by the way’ to finish with. There may be one or two people out there who think I’m being unduly harsh on refs and that they should be protected. Maybe I am, but I can only compare things with my old day job which I left on Monday. I was a District Judge. I gave reasons in public for every decision I made, even the most trivial decisions. The press came whenever they wanted and reported whatever they felt like. Almost every real decision – guilty or not guilty, prison, fine or whatever – was liable to appeal without further ado. Some times the appeal court came to a different decision. Some times even that decision was appealed. The judges there, like me, are only human. What’s so special about referees that their very human nature has to be so jealously protected? Answers in an e mail!

Tranmere Rovers left Valley Parade about as angry with the Referee as they could be.

Having come over from the Wirral on a wet Yorkshire Sunday afternoon they left stung with the feeling that the man in the middle had robbed them of a penalty, given a goal which did not go over the line and then allowed a soft penalty against them which led to them going out of the FA Cup at the first hurdle. As the Referee went down the tunnel at VP the boos that surrounded him could have left him in no doubt as to what the visitors thought of his display.

Meanwhile – at the other end of Valley Parade – Lewis Emanuel wandered from the field in a tattered shirt. Tranmere Rovers defender Paul Linwood in what is euphemistically called a “confrontation” had ripped Emanuel’s shirt. Emanuel might have been nursing bruises on his legs sustained from Linwood’s kicks at the ball that Mani shielded at the corner flag – notoriously the lest pleasant of the in-game time wasting tactics and the short straw for any player. Sure enough as Emanuel shielded he defended the ball from two kicks before Linwood stopped aiming for the round white thing and started to kick Lewis. Two swipes connected before Lewis turned round and the square up began. Another firm kick from Linwood as he ripped Emanuel’s shirt and Emanuel took a firm grip of the Tranmere player. The referee booked both.

I honestly do not know what Refereeing is for anymore.

When I was younger I had a sense that Referees – like Policemen – were there to punish those who do bad things and in a way both still do. Much of what the Referee does centres around his cards although I have long since stopped trying to read anything into those decisions. Linwood is given the same punishment as Emanuel when one is playing the game – albeit in a way we might not like – and the other is annoyed by his play enough to start kicking assaults. They both get the same punishment as Dean Windass gets for talking out of turn and a lesser punishment than Windass does when he effs and jeffs.

If you can find logic for that then you are deluding yourself that one exists. It is simply wrong.

However Windass swearing and Linwood’s shirt ripping assaulting do fall within the remit of offences occurring outside the flow of the game. Both are technically speaking criminal offences – although the laws on vulgarities would have to be stretched to cover a footballer – and have no effect on the course of the game unlike a handball or a trip and while they are to be discouraged football’s authorities make a big leap trying to enforce laws of the game over law’s of society and has at times failed. Duncan Ferguson’s red card and additional suspensions during a Dundee United game a number of years ago was dished out by the Scottish Football Association who assumed that the violence would be kept in football circles but the Sheriff saw differently and Big Dunc was sent to prison for assault.

Any punishment football had in place fell a long way short of a few months in clink.

Away from out of the flow of game offences football has a series of rules regarding offences which do interrupt the flow of play which are designed or once were designed to keep that flow going. Back in 1980 Willie Young broken West Ham hearts by pulling down the then 17 Paul Allen on his way to goal in the FA Cup final and his booking for what would now be called a “last man foul” was scant punishment.

At some point after that the idea of sending off players for a professional foul was suggested not as a punishment for the likes of Young but as a deterrent. The idea was that the red card would be so costly a punishment and such a handicap on the team that a player would instead of diving in to foul as “the last man” he would allow the striker to continue to the goal scoring opportunity unfouled creating a more flowing and more entertaining game.

We saw the outcome of this rule yesterday when Dean Windass latched onto a through ball by Owen Morrison and got into a goal scoring position in the penalty area only to be fouled by Ian Sharps of Tranmere. The Referee gave a penalty but Sharpes was not sent off regardless of the fact that the rules say he should have been because to do so would be too harsh a punishment.

One does not want to assume what went on in the Referee’s mind but the idea that the punishment was too harsh – losing a man for the last half hour and probably a goal down – most likely occurred to him and he decided to counter balance the decision he has made to give the penalty by failing to apply the rules as they are laid out. What is supposed to be a deterrent to prevent Sharps from making the tackle and allow the striker to shoot – which is supposed to be the exciting part of football – becomes a subjective punishment.

The next time a player is in the position Sharps found himself in he will no doubt make the same decision to foul to just because the punishment is not given out consistently and thus may be avoided but because it has become so commonplace. In the day when a team can expect players sent off for swearing a red card for a defender has become an almost meritous thing. Managers talk about “silly” cards with those gained in the act of breaking up the flow of football for the opposition and for supporters as being the proper yellows and reds.

Red cards, yellow cards: All the cost of doing business these days.

Before the Windass penalty Tranmere had a shout for a penalty themselves. The far end of Valley Parade does not afford the quality of view to say if this case has merit but far too often balls bouncing to hit hands as opposed to hand being put in the way (deliberately or inadvertently) are being begged for as handball offences. Football should punish those who stick out an arm to stop the ball and those who leave arms laying away from bodies which block the ball but occasions where the ball inadvertently hits an arm only blocking it’s path to the players body are not something we should consider worth the same punishment as a trip which breaks up play.

On top of all this we have a Referee and a linesman who see the ball bounce down from the crossbar and maybe go into the goal but maybe not and give what seemed like a best and even handed decision. It could have been wrong but if it was it was done as a judgement call and not as the product of confusing and neutered rules.

One can forgive Referee mistakes in matters of empirical judgement. The second guessing and uneven application of clear rules on the other hand has created a system where any deterrent factor of discipline in football is lost and results in players fighting because as Paul Linwood kicked out Lewis Emanuel seemed to sense that no one else was doing anything to prevent the opposition player from taking chunks out of his legs.

I do not know what Referees, card, discipline et al are supposed to be doing anymore. Every week Referees are booed and teams are unhappy but as representatives and poor executives of such a deeply broken system one cannot say they do not deserve such criticism.

Football discipline is broken from top to bottom and very few elements of it work as they should. The game continues despite it and an industry has been established about moaning about it but when as we see now both teams regularly leave games complaining about the men in the middle it becomes clear that the game carries on in spite of and not because of their officiating.