The human element in football

Dec 10, 2011 - Siddharth Vishwanathan

Tags:

football

A referee went to heaven. On arriving at the Gates, St Peter asked him if he had done anything wrong in his life.

He replied that he was refereeing a game and with just a few minutes to go, and with the game tied, he gave a penalty to the away side. “But”, he said, “it wasn’t really a penalty”. St Peter asked him, “when and where was this?”. The referee looked down at his watch and said “about 35 seconds ago at Old Trafford”. Ho-hum.

Now, I’ll be honest; the insults that I sometimes hurl towards a referee on my television screen would make John Terry blush. Yet, every so often I genuinely wonder why anyone in their right minds would volunteer to don the whistle come Saturdays and Sundays.

Anyone who has ever tried refereeing a football match, at whatever level, can testify that when it comes to spotting transgressions, it is nigh on impossible to be 100% certain of any decision you make. The best referee, as Pierluigi Colina (6-time World Referee of the Year) once said, is the one who makes the most number of well-educated guesses.

This observation is used by the propagators of video technology. And no doubt, the number of wrong decisions shall probably decrease if the referees have the option of consulting video replays. However, is that what you as a football fan want?

Think about it. You will no longer be able to defend your team’s loss to a rival by claiming that the referee was a “******”. You will miss out on golden moments where a rival team’s player gets charged by the FA for tweeting a photo of Howard Webb in your team’s jersey. Blaming your teams luck instead of their ineptitude? Forget it. Instead, you will have to admit, even to yourself, that your team deserved to lose. Is there a greater agony than that?

I consider the “referee was a ******” excuse as football’s gift to it’s fans. If this human element is replaced with a technological one, it will lead to less controversy and, consequently, fewer water cooler debates.

Arguing with my friends over the validity of a key decision has always been an entertaining past-time for me.

Technology solves problems they say. Well, I don’t see a problem. Do you?

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