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Nothing is certain in football. Nothing, that is, except refereeing blunders. They’re an ingrained part of the game, and the constant bane of a football fan.
The subjective make-up of human nature means that mistakes will always be made on the football field, but surely there’s a way to reduce the errors currently seen weekly in Australia.
While the standard of football has never been higher in the A-League, and the attendance and television viewership numbers are impressively increasing, one area is still found wanting.
Referees are still dragging the chain, and the standard and consistency of their work has to improve.
They aren’t performing to a standard indicative of the rest of the competition, and haven’t been for 10 years. But we can’t just immediately point the finger at the men in the middle, we should be asking what we can do to help them.
Currently, refereeing in the A-League is just a side story for our officials. In their real lives, they hold down regular jobs ranging from teaching to working in finance and sales.
How often have you been able to give your part-time job the time and effort it deserves? How often have you held a part-time job while working Monday to Friday? Referees who manage their private lives with the pressures and anxieties associated with whistleblowing deserve full credit, but you can’t expect them to perform to professional standards.
The latest A-League refereeing shit-storm surrounds perennial villain to fans and players alike, Ben Williams, who sent Nikola Petkovic off the pitch in Sydney FC’s FFA Cup clash against Adelaide United midweek.
Williams has been stood down, FFA boss Damien de Bohun has admitted it was a mistake, and yet the Match Review Panel has not rescinded the red card. Disregarding that bizarre chain of events, the incident brings up the question as to why our referees aren’t full-time professionals.
If you want quality, you have to pay for it, and FFA should be scraping around their coffers to acquire that professionalism that is missing from the men and women in yellow.
“Like everyone in the game, referees are accountable for their performances and decisions,” De Bohun said.
“The referees come under enormous scrutiny by the public and media, as well as the official reviews of assessors.
“Accountability is part of improving the standard of refereeing in the A-League.”
Yes, referees are indeed under enormous scrutiny, similar to that of players and managers. Therefore, they should be treated in the same light, with a nice hefty pay packet and with it financial security.
With an improved wage, they can pack in their current full-time jobs and concentrate on immersing themselves completely in the game. Increased training sessions and a greater level of preparation for matches, as well as more regular meetings with fellow officials.
At the moment, referees attend two sessions a week, one on tactics and the other on fitness. Blunders are inevitable with such limited exposure to football from Monday to Friday.
And the blunders are nothing new, not this season or in past seasons. The Sydney Derby was full of contentious decisions, while Jarred Gillett also failed to control Victory’s demolition of Western Sydney in Round 1. A number of early challenges went unpunished and Matthieu Delpierre’s push on Brendan Santalab in the box was ignored.
Last year there were accusations – rightly or wrongly – that Alessandro Del Piero received preferential treatment during a Melbourne Victory versus Sydney FC game. That was in the middle of a horror two months for FFA, as bloopers became more common than correct calls in October and November.
The A-League director of referees Ben Wilson, responding to the criticism at the time, said he was satisfied with his employees’ performances.
“I’m happy with the standard of refereeing, on the understanding that we can still get better,” Wilson said last year.
“Those people that perform get more matches than those people who don’t perform.”
Of course Ben Wilson is going to defend his referees, he was one himself once upon a time. And he also made mistakes, including an absolute clanger in a Sydney FC versus Newcastle Jets game in November 2010 where as an assistant he flagged a ball out, only to backtrack. It resulted in a Bruno Cazarine goal.
The mistakes from Williams are also nothing new. He’s a trigger-happy merchant who has been getting away with his egotistical antics for too long.
He’s an experienced ref, but he gets it wrong too often, and has now sent off two players already in just two weeks. Last year he handed out seven red cards. At least he’s consistent.
But consistency is the key. That’s all that fans, players and managers want. And the best way to do that is to have referees training together as much as possible. Logistics won’t allow weekly meetings, but making referees full-time certainly would improve their ability to work together more often.
The move won’t eliminate the mistakes, but it will surely lessen them, and would also lead to referees handing out uniform rulings for incidents such as diving.
That all said, referees often get the harsh calls right. The penalty awarded to Besart Berisha in the 2012 grand final was widely criticised, but in the end the decision was shown to be correct. There was contact, and it was a penalty.
Strebre Delovski is one of the A-League’s best referees and has managed to maintain a high standard during his time in the middle. He may make howlers, which is inevitable, but at least he has a history of admitting his mistakes.
Delovski described his first game in charge, Newcastle versus Queensland Roar, as a “shocker”, while he also conceded he should have awarded a penalty to Melbourne Victory in their 1-0 semi-final loss to Brisbane last season.
Mistakes will never be banished completely, that much is clear. But they can be reduced, and full-time status would assist the cause.
As well as rehauling the referees’ wage system, there also needs to be a review of the Match Review Panel. How is it possible that De Bohun can come out and label Williams’ Petkovic call “not warranted” and yet the red card and suspension remains?
It’s yet another inconsistency that needs to be rectified.
Former A-League, NSL and state league players should also be sounded out. Part of the answer is to have qualified, full-time professionals, but another aspect is surely to get people who have first-hand knowledge of the game involved.
We can still have those with no working knowledge of football officiating, but having former players involved in the training process can only be a good thing.
They know the game inside-out, and they’ll likely hold more respect from players, coaches and fans alike.
The A-League needs to at least start by installing five full-time officials for the 2015-16 season. That should be a minimum requirement. I don’t know if FFA are in a position to produce the funds, but it would be money well spent.
Perhaps clubs could even be sounded out about contributing to making officials professional, though that could likely result in unwanted repercussions when inevitable mistakes occur.
At the moment A-League referees can earn about $36,000 a season, that’s not enough for us to demand high quality officiating.
Some may argue that it’s a waste of money to pay more for a job that will always produce mistakes, but if handled properly turning referees professional could definitely improve the standard of officiating in the A-League.
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