Is There Life On Mars?

You certainly won’t die of boredom watching Everton at the moment. Last Saturday’s match against Blackburn wanted for nothing in terms of incident, excitement and passion and I was glad to see that virtually everybody in the ground waited until the final whistle to accord the team a well-deserved ovation.

I was unable to go for the usual post-match pint and analysis and found myself tuning in to the local radio for the phone-ins as I drove home. If anyone is watching that excellent tv series, Life On Mars, at the moment I felt like Sam Tyler who is in a deep coma, so deep that he finds himself in 1973 while he can hear 2006 voices but cannot respond to what they are saying. Is writing to Bluekipper as sad as phoning the radio when you’ve nothing to say? I hope not. Who are these people? Two consecutive callers wanted to give us the benefit of their wisdom that Phil Neville had been “hiding” in the game they had allegedly just watched. Just as it would be impossible to single Neville out as the star man on the day, it would be equally impossible to exclude him from what was essentially a star team performance.

So somewhat disenchanted with the quality of caller to that station I switched to the other one. This time it was the host, or whatever they are called, who made me feel like I was on a different planet. Now according to this bloke, “the referee had no choice but to send Turner off.” Wrong. Later that evening Lineker pointed out the bit about denying a goal-scoring opportunity, which, had the referee been on nodding terms with the laws of the game, would indeed have given him the option of the yellow card for the goalkeeper. However, there is another reason why Turner should not have even been cautioned and this boils down to the ineptitude of all three officials for this match.

If you watched them closely, the three officials really did not understand the current interpretation of the law governing offside. The inconsistency was embarrassing. In the Turner incident, the ball was played forward at which point a Blackburn player was in an offside position. As he made no immediate attempt to “interfere with play”, the assistant referee did not flag for offside. The ball seemed to slow down as it went towards the Everton box and Stubbs was clearly aware of and worried about this because his peripheral vision had picked up that the same Blackburn player was now trying to make up ground fast. At this point the assistant referee should have deemed him to be offside and the game would have been halted by the referee. Instead we all know what happened next. I feel very sorry for Iain Turner who has briefly shown that a) he is a quality goalkeeper and b) he is a decent young man for the way he accepted the referee’s harsh judgement. This incident will be the making or the breaking of Iain Turner as a professional footballer.

Who is to blame for this kind of mess? Well clearly the game’s administrators don’t help with their regular tinkering and new “interpretations” and their inability to communicate these to the rest of us. However, it is really the lack of quality in the game’s officials which causes most of the chaos. This lack of quality is a broad term which covers the kind of ineptitude we saw last Saturday to the, there is no other word for it, cheating we see from certain referees. How people like Riley and Poll can be regarded as a “top officials” is beyond me and you have to wonder how they make it to the top.

Well that is the interesting question. To make it as a premiership referee you have to start quite young and it helps to live in a nice postcode. You have to serve your time, keep your nose clean and hope that the opportunity comes along. What needs to happen is that experienced players, amateurs and semi-pros in their mid to late 20’s, should be identified by a proactive F.A. and then encouraged and supported to take up refereeing, and the good ones fast tracked and promoted rapidly into what is now a well paid job. The game is crying out to be handled by people who understand nuances as well as laws, who can differentiate between clumsiness and foul play and who know how to let a game flow. Perhaps even the teams of 3 officials could stay together for a season and thereby learn how to act as a coherent unit. One thing is for sure; the atmosphere at 5 o’clock last Saturday, had the ten men lost, could have been as ugly as it turned out to be extremely happy and that would have been down to Mr Walton and friends.

A final word on the incompetence of football officialdom, or more accurately here the impoverished state of the administration of the game in this country; where did this “compliance unit” come from? I am not known to be a big fan of Duncan Ferguson but a 7 match ban was ridiculous. Again it is the absence of any kind of consistency or transparency that causes people to have no faith in the system. There is no short term solution to the mess that the administrators have made of the game, but if we can get the standard of refereeing improved by using the right quality of people (as above) then these are the ones who should comprise any unit designed to ensure a fair playing field for all, not just the G14.

JOE 90. (16/02/06)

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