You're viewing a single thread.
I am furious.
honestly - we are not good enough. The premier league is going to do this shit refereeing like 60% of the time. We need to be good enough to overcome bad referees and Stokeish tactics. Nobody is creating shit. We're in the horseshoe of death again.
Here's the thing - consider the level that we would need to be to overcome this level of shit refereeing. We'd need adamantium skeletons for all of our players, maximum inhalers and caffeine pills from Liverpool, and all the luck in the world to level this playing field. If shit refereeing occurs 60% of the time, I don't think you can chalk that up to incompetence or accidents. Why is it that VAR seemed to be completely off for the first 60 minutes? Why did they get more yellow cards for dissent than for the actual horror tackles they put in? That's completely unfair to ask a team to just "be better" to overcome this shit.
It IS completely unfair but this is where we are with this league. We don't have endless oil money or endless media lapdogs - we need to be better to be better. This season was always going to be tougher. If we can get Odegaard fit and firing again we'll be in a much better place than now because this Rice-Havertz midfield is not getting us goals.
Or, hear me out, fucking audit the PGMOL and stop the weaponized incompetence surrounding VAR. On a good day it's a bunch of old dudes trying to figure out how to make the technology work, on a bad day like today it's being used to actively fuck teams over. The PL is having a field day with Ange and oily Newcastle having their resurgence, and they will stop at nothing to manufacture their narratives.
After seeing how the VAR hasn't helped at all and in fact made things worse by only taking away the benefit of the doubt of being human, I'm starting to side with Gunnerblog and say just take it out. This league cannot referee the game and VAR only makes the corrupt incompetence more stark.
I'd love an audit but all the bodies who would audit are also corrupt. Including the broadcasters who keep giving cover to the bad decisions.
I can't disagree more. VAR has been completely misused from day one in the PL intentionally, because the PGMOL want exactly that - they want to go back to the good old days where the ref on the pitch has the final say. Look at how the interviews with former officials go - "I didn't want to embarrass him", "he's my mate", "he's had a rough day". It's all machismo, and the only way to fix it is to use it correctly, as so many other leagues/nations have managed to do. The PL needs to be shamed into fixing it - it's the only way that reliably works.
I would love it if that happens. But to do that would take, as they say, a root-and-branch examination and overhaul of how the referees are trained and assessed, which might lso take an overhaul of the FA as a whole.
I am not going to hold my breath for premier league referees to suddenly get better until they are completely out of the picture like with the goal decision system.
You're not wrong. At the very least you'd need to change the assessments and probably import some foreign referees to set an example.
I also think there need to be harsher punishments for making very incorrect decisions. I'm not talking ban them for life, but maybe something more than suspended for one week? Like being sent to referee Championship matches instead.
I guess what I'm actually advocating for is referee pro/rel.
@sensiblepuffin @raumdeuter agree about foreign refs. We have best players and coaches from around the world, why not refs?
It's true. From the FA's website: "Anyone can become a referee with The FA granted that you are at least 14-years-old and a resident of England."
Surely people don't hate living in England enough that you couldn't tempt them with 70k pounds (Stuart Atwell, 2021) or even 48k pounds (Andy Madley, 2021)?