Referees really do care
THE documentary on Sky Sports, The Referees — Onside with
Carragher & Neville, worked really hard to show us that referees are human beings who care about getting decisions right.
They were shown training hard in physical sessions and in technical review meetings when mistakes were analysed with an honesty which would be refreshing to see if made public.
Gary Neville articulated this by insisting we no longer see a referee’s character. Sadly, referees’ chief Mike Riley’s response to Neville would suggest no change as he believes that ‘referees should be seen and not heard’.
That seems a huge pity as the programme gave such a great insight into Mike Dean, Martin Atkinson and Anthony Taylor, and if they now just disappear the work of this documentary will seem lost.
The session where Neville and Jamie Carragher tried judging some offside situations was a good way to show how difficult these decisions are and how good the select group of assistant referees are at getting the majority of them right.
I enjoyed the assistants expressing their frustration at the begrudging way their accuracy is reported. Either a player is offside or not, and so their decisions are also either right or wrong. To say they are only just right is unfair and they were correct to highlight it.
Seeing the honesty of the referees when reviewing replays excited me and shows just how effective the introduction of video reviews could be — provided the active official is able to accept an error live in front of a baying crowd.
But watching staged sessions is one thing. Seeing that in action every week is quite another.