by Nick Mabey.
The season is well underway now and there’s always much to talk about. A clampdown on time wasting and dissent is hitting the headlines, even managing to upstage VAR and the transfer window this year. I’m hoping it’s just the start of a refereeing revolution.
At the start of every season, referees in professional football are instructed by the ruling bodies (FIFA/UEFA/EPL/FA – take your pick) to focus on certain aspects that they think will improve the ‘product’ – a tacky, commercial word too often used to describe the beautiful game. The referees duly brief the clubs, implement the changes, cause controversial headlines and by now we are normally at the start of the process of gently sweeping the changes under the carpet and forgetting they ever happened.
Not this year – at least not yet. Referees have been brandishing yellow cards for dissent much more energetically and frequently and I’m really hoping this will persist. They are even issuing real yellow cards for the offence of waving imaginary yellow cards – hurrah! The way players harangue match officials is frankly embarrassing and has an insidious trickle-down effect of normalising aggressive and even violent conduct towards referees in the thousands of matches that take place every weekend.
I’d go further. In the top few divisions, match officials nowadays all wear microphones. We saw in the Women’s World Cup how these can be used to communicate to the crowd. How about having a live feed to commentators and even TV audiences as they do in rugby? It might be XXX rated for a couple of weeks but then it would stop, just like that. And even if the TV audience doesn’t hear it, why not use recordings to retrospectively punish players even further? If we are going to eradicate dissent let’s get radical.
It’s also great that time wasting is also being tackled, in a number of ways. Booking players for delaying restarts or artfully redirecting the ball is something that should have always happened so I’m hoping that will stay now. What I also like is the addition of more extra time at the end of the first and second halves, to make up for injuries, goal celebrations, substitutions, VAR reviews and anything else. In Southampton’s first game, there were 17 additional minutes added on in total, a great thing that I hope endures. We’ve already heard moans from Pep Guardiola about this, citing the impact on tiring players. This is the same manager who decided to make zero substitutions in Man City’s match against Newcastle, despite being allowed five and having a bench valued at over £100m!
Again I’d go further with this concept. Looking at rugby there is a clock visible and the referee says ‘clock on’ and ‘clock off’ to the timekeeper so that everyone in the stadium, and watching on TV, knows where we are. It does my head in at St. Marys (and everywhere else) that there is a clock running all through the match but it stops at 45.00 and 90.00, denying supporters the chance to know how long is left at the time they need it most. The drama in rugby of ‘the clock turning red’ (i.e. time’s up) and the game ending when the ball next goes out of play would be a fantastic addition to football. It’s so obvious to me.
There’s also so much football could learn from rugby and cricket in how to deploy video reviews, but I’m going to save that for when Southampton are in a division where VAR is actually used. For now I am enjoying not having the prospect of a video review blight my supporting experience, although I may not be so happy when we suffer a first refereeing ‘injustice’ that costs us points.
I’ve managed to get to the end of this article without actually praising the super Saints for their excellent start to the season – I don’t want to jinx it. And I’m not going to mention the transfer window – too fluid – but I will just wish a fond farewell to James Ward-Prowse. It’s not often we get to watch a player for more than ten years at our club, and I wish him all the best at West Ham. James has been a great player for us, most noted for his free-kicks of course, but also his amazing durability. In the last four seasons he’s only missed two league games, which is a great testament to his fitness and commitment. He is also a model professional and, seemingly, a thoroughly decent human being – definitely not someone likely to be troubled by additional attention from this season’s revolting referees.
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