A Shocking Decision – But Don’t Blame the Player, Blame the Game

When the referee sent Robin van Persie off on Tuesday evening for ‘time wasting’ (See the video below) , millions of fans around the world and probably all 22 players on the pitch were gobsmacked. I try my best to stick up for referees when they miss fouls or make incorrect decisions, it’s impossible to see everything, especially at the speed football is played at nowadays. This decision was different. This was a judgement made by the referee that Van Persie had definitely heard his whistle and kicked the ball away in order to prolong Barcelona taking a free kick by a couple of seconds

Let’s look at things from Van Persie’s point of view. This is one of the biggest club games of his career, the pressure doesn’t get much higher, and there are 95,000 incredibly loud fans all around him, doing anything from screaming, booing or anything else to try and put him off just that little bit. With so much glory and money at stake, it is imperative that he is focused on doing whatever he can to score. In such a situation, surely he shouldn’t have to be consciously listening for a referee’s whistle? Even if he does hear the whistle, there must always be a bit of doubt in his mind whether it’s definitely the referee, and not a fan trying to put him off – he should always shoot just in case it is the latter.

If it had been a fan who had blown a whistle in the crowd and Van Persie had stopped, Arsenal would’ve given up a rare chance to score against (probably) the best club in the world. How much could that have cost Arsenal? It shouldn’t even be a risk about having a shot or not, players should be incentivised to score goals, this isn’t the way the law works at the moment.

The argument that Van Persie’s shot was 1 second after the whistle is neither here nor there, if it was 0.1 seconds he wouldn’t have had a chance to react, if it was 4 or 5 seconds after just one blow of the whistle it would be even more more convincing that he hadn’t heard the whistle.

As I said above you can’t expect a referee to see everything, but you should expect a referee to be able to think rationally and reasonably, considering all information available which is specific to that event, including distance from player, pressure on player, match situation and the fact that you’re in the biggest and probably loudest stadium in Europe. I wonder how a referee can get to such a high level despite lacking a fair amount of common sense, maybe referees who actually apply common sense whilst perhaps bending or breaking refereeing laws don’t progress because they don’t go exactly by the book?

You can’t create laws which apply to every single circumstance. As circumstances differ, the law must adjust and adapt suitably.

But you can blame none of this on the specific referee, he always does the best he can. Blame those who educate referees, select referees, and football lawmakers. Things such as death threats to referees are ridiculous acts by primitive fans, who haven’t got the brain power to think. Blaming individual referees will never lead to long term success and improvement.

(Image Courtesy of nicksarebi)

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