Premier League referees are in the spotlight after a number of high-profile incidents during the weekend fixtures. When are they not?
Refereeing decisions come and go. Mistakes are made because that’s what humans do. Whether or not there’s sufficient and suitable accountability in those instances is a matter of opinion, but there’s probably more than most of us realise.
Football as a highly professionalised industry has developed an addiction to solving problems with problems. Interpretation is part of referees’ responsibility in applying the Laws of the Game but technical language is the primary tool used in their defence.
The referee’s countdown is final, and not only in Europe
The natural consequence of a sport that’s played in grey but craves black and white is a constantly growing rule book that inadvertently ties itself in knots.
That’s what football has now. VAR, causes celebre, FIFA interference and persistent misreading of public opinion have all played their part in a version of football that doesn’t understand its own Laws.
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They are simple and open to interpretation while the sport thunders towards officiousness in a great global game of busybody Whack-A-Mole. Of course it’s causing issues.
Far beyond the purview of the increasingly maligned and caricatured Pro Ref, football’s attempt to whack the mole of time-wasting has created the unedifying spectacle of referees counting down various time limits with their fingers while bellowing numbers across the pitch.
Take a moment, step back, and think about that. About how it looks, and what it symbolises. Set aside the use of the whistle for now – that’s a level of technical zealotry for another day.
Referees are now being asked to manually provide a count not only for the goalkeeper to release the ball from their hands in-play but for throw-ins and goal kicks too.
It’s noble in intent but chaotic in practice, and it’s hard to feign surprise at that outcome. Where a referee’s interpretation collides with fans, players and managers thinking they’re getting precision, it’s always going to become just another thing to moan about.
Time-wasting is annoying. That’s as close to a consensus view as football really has, and even then it’s different when it’s our own team doing it. That some of the delays have been baked in by VAR shouldn’t go unacknowledged, but delaying tactics are frustrating to watch and detrimental to the game.
The current answer to that isn’t just undignified. It’s as inexact and just as prone to exactly the same flaws as the time-wasting toolkit referees already had.
It wouldn’t be uncharitable to suggest that referees counting variations of five, eight and ten seconds on their fingers was rushed into football as an overreaction to time-wasting and was poorly considered as a result.
What tends to get lost in the furore of Premier League discourse is that football is a vast, deep, global game. These new gestures look a bit silly at the top; in non-league, they’re embarrassing.
Lower down the pyramid, Saturday afternoons are now dragged through the same rigmarole time and again.
Fans and managers flap their arms around and tap their wrists, inherently partisan but also oblivious that the countdowns are triggered by the referee’s interpretation of necessity.
Players choose not to pick the ball up to take throw-ins and then lose their tempers when a count begins before they have it in their hands. Long throw-ins are exempted to a degree, treated as any other set piece where the taker and some hefty centre-backs need to get into position.
Over. And over. And over.
In FourFourTwo‘s opinion, these measures do little to address the scourge of time-wasting, creating instead a mess of ignorance and fury and fussiness that solves nothing that couldn’t already have been dealt with by clamping down on time-wasting.
Referees are still directed to judge when a countdown begins on that basis. One might argue that a serious sport would simply have embarked upon a crackdown using its existing laws.