Is the overall standard of officiating in the Premier League in decline?
That is an exceedingly difficult question to answer because for all that we like to believe that laws are definitive, many and most are open to interpretation. And that makes them subjective.
Take bookings for trips, pulls and mistimed challenges. Let’s include dissent in there too.
One referee might go into a game determined to ‘let things go’, for the opening half-an-hour. He will do this with the intention of reducing the risk of a card-fest – perhaps he is about to take charge of a derby that has a track record of boiling over – and furthermore, to increase the chances of an entertaining, free-flowing match breaking out.
Another official meanwhile may go into proceedings with a wholly contrasting game-plan. Their objective is to stamp out any wrongdoing from the off, to make it abundantly clear to the players that he will take no nonsense that afternoon.
An identical foul in each game therefore will be treated very differently, with one overlooked and the other duly punished. They are judged subjectively.
“You don’t know what you’re doing,” chants a particularly loud fan-base to the first referee, furious at seeing their rivals rough up their team and get away with it.
Not only is the referee rubbish, but he is from Bolton, which is only a short drive from the home of their rivals. Irrefutably then, he is also corrupt.
“The referee’s an onanist,” screams another set of supporters at the second referee, or words to that effect. They’re furious that every committed challenge is resulting in a yellow card being brandished, and because their team are playing a top-six side, are convinced that it’s yet another illustration of big club bias.
The Premier League, after all, actively want Manchester United to win the title and have clearly informed their officials to ensure this happens.
Yet, untangling ourselves from such silliness, does the actions of either referee make them ‘rubbish’? In truth, they are executing their respective game-plans well.
Now, for clarity, it should be said that referees absolutely should not go into matches with any agenda, or indeed seek to impose a narrative. That in itself makes them fair-game for criticism, because it propagates the one aspect of officiating that annoys us all, that of inconsistency.
To counter this however, they are human.
If subjectivity is one consideration we must acknowledge before we gauge the standard of refereeing in this country, another is of course the fairly recent introduction of VAR.
Time and again, we are seeing VAR fail, and time and again we misconstrue this as poor officiating, as opposed to what it really comes down to, which is woeful implementation of a system in desperate need of early revision.
Take the recent farce in North London as a prime indicator of this, a cock-up that altered Liverpool’s standing in the Premier League betting despite them scoring a perfectly legitimate goal at Spurs.
As Luis Diaz raced through and scored, the only example of poor officiating was the linesman wrongly flagging for offside, an error that can surely be forgiven as we’ve witnessed this occur a million times before.
What followed thereafter however was unforgivable, a comedy skit that brought to mind several chimps trying to make sense of an Apple Macbook.
An initial, fundamental misunderstanding was never rectified as people talked over each other – as was painfully demonstrated by the released audio – with everyone committing throughout to jargon instead of plain speaking.
Sadly, when it comes to VAR being used incorrectly, this was hardly the first occurrence either.
Last February at Crystal Palace, a Brighton effort was chalked off when a line was drawn on the wrong player, leaving Pervis Estupinan offside when in fact he wasn’t.
That same month at title-chasing Arsenal, Lee Mason was focusing so hard on whether a Brentford player was interfering with play – it was rightfully deemed that he wasn’t – that he forgot to check for offside. And guess what? He was.
In each instance, the PGMOL issued an apology but to little avail. Because what’s the betting that Roberto De Zerbi and Mikel Arteta would have much rather had the points.
When separating a persistent failure to properly implement VAR with officiating in its purest form we find that the standards of refereeing in this country are presently no worse or better than times past but here comes the kicker, here comes to the twist.
Because a simple Google search of the subject brings forth a multitude of articles from the early Nineties to today, articles that bemoan the inadequate levels of officiating in the Premier League; articles which insist that 1997, or 2004, or 2016 is a particularly low ebb.
We’ve always been short-changed. That’s the truth of it. We’ve always deserved better. VAR has simply shone a big, ugly light on a long-term deficiency that needs dealing with.
*Credit for all of the photos in this article belongs to Alamy*
