Will refereeing standards ever improve?
At times during the games, they are useless, they are cheats they are massive fans of whoever the opposition happens to be, they are intentionally trying to give decisions against your team and in favour of the other team – according to fans of all clubs.
Do we, as fans, have our green tinted spectacles on when analysing a referees performance? We more than likely do but my problem is the overall standard of refereeing in Scotland.
I am sure any fan could highlight bad decisions regardless of what team they support and what country they watch their football in but that’s not the point, the point is that the performance of most referees in Scotland are simply not good enough and must improve.
For me, one of the worst culprits is Iain Brines, last season up at Perth with the Michael Duberry incident (for those who don’t remember, Duberry handled the ball in full view of the ref while the ball was in play and Celtic were not awarded a penalty. Brines allowed the match to continue). How can the referee not have noticed that?
Even if there was a reason for him not seeing it, would it be a reasonable explanation? It doesn’t really matter because the general consensus seems to be that we don’t have many referees so we’d better not criticise the existing ones as we don’t want to upset them.
To my knowledge, the referees do not have any sort of punishment for bad decisions or rewards for good performances and they do not have to explain their decisions, certainly not in public anyway.
The official line is that referees cannot come out and publicly talk about games but we do hear from them now and again. Referees in the past have expressed a desire to be able to explain decisions so why not allow them to?
Obviously this would have to be controlled as it could quickly just turn into an angry mob of defeated managers and players giving abuse to the guy or arguing with his explanations.
Another thing that I would like them to be able to do is be given a day or two after a match to be able to issue or revoke any yellow/red cards that have been given out during the games.
There was a recent article on this website reporting that referees are now earning over £840 per match, do they deserve it ?
When some players are on perhaps ten times that amount per week then the referees may feel entitled to it and with the amount of money available in football, maybe the referees think they are important enough to merit such a high salary.
I am no expert on how a referee goes from a person who fancies being a football referee to a fully fledged SPL official. I don’t know much about what happens in between but I do know that it involves turning up at a lot of amateur games and involves being threatened and intimidated at small venues with no stewards or police for protection.
Maybe by the time these guys have gone through all of this, it’s time to say thanks for the last 10 years or so of hard work, now here is your reward, this is not my opinion but I am just adding it in to give a bit of balance to the piece.
There has been a lot of arguments for and against full time referees, like all things that haven’t happened, it’s impossible to say if that will improve the standard. Some sort of access to a replay certainly would help but it would also slow the game down if the ref is to stop the game every time a decision has to be made.
Why not give the fourth official or one of the many other officials in the stand access to a replay and if the ref gets something wrong, they can notify them ? They have ear phones and microphones so they can already communicate with one another.
The answer to that would be that not all grounds are capable of having such a thing. At Celtic Park there will be much more cameras than most other stadiums so does that mean that Celtic would be subject to a higher standard of refereeing depending on where our games are played ?
I think it’s an almost impossible task to improve referees but in my opinion, if refs were paid based on their overall performance, it would improve. It may add more pressure to them and it may make a tough job even more tough but for the money on offer, I wouldn’t expect anything other than a highly stressful and very difficult job.