I didn’t groan like I sometimes do when learning the identity of the referee for our next game when I heard Martin Atkinson was going to be taking charge of the Liverpool game. I’ve always considered him to be one of the better referees in the domestic game and it should be said that he was the man in the middle for the one game I can remember this season where nearly all of the major decisions went in favour of City (our win over Brighton in November).
I was critical of Mr Atkinson in my piece on the Liverpool game though when I said that, by my reckoning, it took him seventy five minutes to penalise a Liverpool player for a foul and, in a game that was so important for both sides at this late stage of the season, I find it very hard to imagine that one of the teams involved could play about 85 per cent of the match before they fouled an opposing player.
However, a couple of things need to be said here as well. Firstly, I am not infallible and it’s perfectly possible that I might have missed Mr Atkinson giving a free kick to City after one of their players had been fouled well before the seventy fifth minute. Also, I although I’m going to talk about two specific incidents in the game shortly which didn’t go in our favour, I don’t believe Sunday’s was a match which was, first and foremost, decided by refereeing decisions – although City competed well and threatened to, perhaps, get something from the match for almost an hour, there can be no doubting surely that Liverpool were the better side and deserved their win.
Nevertheless, it was still possible to come out of the game thinking, firstly, that referees at this level seem far more inclined to apply any benefit of the doubt in favour of the “bigger” teams than they are to do so with the smaller fry of the Premier League and, secondly, and more importantly for the purposes of this piece, that the way the game is refereed in this country is not doing England any favours at all on the international stage.
While it’s hardly the case that the sort of illogical thinking we see applied every week in this country, both on the pitch and in edicts coming down from above, that I’m going to talk about doesn’t occur in other places, it does seem less prevalent than here.
I’m going to talk in particular about two incidents involving Sean Morrison at opposite ends of the pitch. I’ll start with the penalty he conceded and say that from my distance of about a hundred yards away, I left the game on Sunday not having much idea of whether it was a foul or not.
Having now seen highlights of the game on Match of the Day 2, on the club website and one or two other online sources, I’ll say that I didn’t realise at the time how culpable our captain was. Sean made three separate errors I’m afraid and I think it’s possible that the first two played a part in contributing to the third one in that he was desperate to put things right.
For me, Neil Warnock was correct when he called it a soft penalty, but I believe the way he talked about it generally indicates that he agreed it was a penalty. If I’m right in interpreting our manager’s comments in that way, then I must say I think he got that right as well – for me it was a penalty, albeit one which need not have been conceded.
I’m also completely with Neil Warnock when he spoke of Mo Salah’s part in the incident. Morrison put him under more physical pressure a few seconds before the Liverpool player went to ground and when Salah did eventually fall, there was not the pressure being put on him to justify him tumbling over in the manner he did – in short, Salah dived.
A couple of things need to be said here. Firstly, it has been claimed that Salah had to go to ground to convince Mr Atkinson that he was being fouled – I’m not sure about that, it seems to me that the referee was going to signal a penalty just as Salah started his dive.
The second point here is that in rugby a referee has the authority to reverse a penalty decision if there is something like retaliation or dissent from a member of the team that had originally had the offence committed against them. Now, I’m not sure that Salah’s dive would have merited a change of decision from Mr Atkinson if such a rule applied in football, but it still seems wrong that Salah gets away scot free with his cheating. The powers that be in terms of refereeing in this country don’t seem to see anything wrong with diving if a foul is thought to have taken place – even if it’s done in circumstances that look ridiculous given the kind of contact which drew the decision.
Before I go on to the second incident, I’d just like to mention something I saw in the Arsenal v Palace game on Match of the Day 2 where home defender Mavropanos was, correctly in my view, penalised and booked for a shirt tugging offence out on the touchline some thirty five yards or so from his team’s goal by referee Jon Moss.
So with that in mind, let’s move on to the other incident from Sunday which occurred in the Liverpool penalty area at a time when I believe the score was 0-0. What happened was that Sean Morrison looped a header on to the roof of the net to end a City attack and, at the time, I barely gave the incident a second thought.
That was why I made little of it in my piece on the game when Neil Warnock claimed afterwards that Liverpool left back Andy Robertson had fouled Morrison.
When I heard our manager’s remarks, I just thought that’s Warnock being Warnock – his team have lost and so there’s always a decision somewhere along the way against them which he uses to divert attention away from the result.
However, having now seen what happened for a second, third, fourth etc. time there is a fairly obvious pull on Morrison’s shirt there from the Scot. It’s hardly a violent tug, but it’s there nevertheless and former referee and long time critic of current refereeing supremo Mike Riley, Keith Hackett considered it be a penalty in this piece on Sunday’s match.
As can be seen, Mr Hackett feels justice was done with the penalty that was awarded and is reluctant to criticise Martin Atkinson for his failure to award one against Robertson, saying “Atkinson, who was some distance from the incident, will have felt he did not have a good enough viewing angle to be able to give a penalty”.
Fair enough, I might think that’s a bit weak, but if the ref wasn’t in a great position, it could be that he missed the offence. Nevertheless, it is not only the ref who can play a part in ensuring that justice is done.
I say this while remembering that it emerged last week that it was the linesman in the City half of the pitch some fifty or sixty yards away from the action who was most adamant it was not a penalty in the incident which saw referee Mike Dean first award City a spot kick up at Burnley ten days ago and then change his mind.
Again, I’ve not got any great problem with that because it all ended up with what I believe was the right decision being made, but if we are saying that the linesman furthest away can have as big a contribution as that towards ensuring correct decisions are made, then it has to follow that he, potentially, had a duty to perform if he clearly saw Robertson grab Morrison’s shirt.
Of course, the linesman who had the best chance to see the incident was the one who was stood very close to where I was sat about twenty yards from where it occurred.
I must admit that it could be said if I missed an incident which took place so close to me. then is it any wonder that the linesman didn’t see it either, but the difference has to be that one of us is a punter looking at things from a, very, one eyed perspective and the other is a so called “elite” official who in situations like that is, basically, looking for two things – offsides and/or fouls.
So, it would appear that none of the three paid officials saw Robertson’s shirt pull – doesn’t that say something about their levels of competence?
Another thing to bear in mind is that, although any sympathy I have for them is pretty limited, referees and linesmen/women are faced with all sorts of individual contests which often involve different degrees of shirt pulling or wrestling at every attacking free kick, corner or long throw in these days. However, the challenge we’re talking about here was in open play after a throw in I believe it was, was half cleared and a cross was put in – therefore, the officials didn’t have all of normal jostling going on to distract them.
Hopefully, the introduction of VAR will see things change for the better, but the fact that it’s needed at all, does say something about the lack of quality of those who officiate at the highest levels in this country.
Yes, blatant offences are missed in other countries, but I’d say there is a better chance of shirt pulling offenders being punished abroad than there is here. You may get the odd penalty being given over here, but, generally speaking, the aforementioned Mike Dean apart, it appears that officials in this country are happy to ignore it all and let them get on with it.
On a scale of severity between one and ten which has something like a viscous leg breaker at ten, what do you reckon Sean Morrison’s foul for the penalty was worth? Two? Three? I don’t think it would be any higher than that. How about the shirt tug he got off Robertson? I’d put it slightly higher because of the degree of cynicism involved and yet you’d be an unlucky player indeed if you cost your side a goal with shirt tug inside your own penalty area these days.
Yet, how does this stand with the decision by Jon Moss in the Arsenal match I mentioned earlier? A shirt pull outside the penalty area and you’re looking at a foul against you and an automatic yellow card, one inside the area and you get away with it probably ninety odd times out of a hundred – the logic is all wrong and the failure by the refereeing authorities to, first, recognise this and then act on it is so revealing.
When you consider what had happened to Sean Morrison a few minutes earlier, plus what has happened to him at so many free kicks, throw ins and corners in the past few seasons and in particular the incident in the Chelsea game when Rudiger virtually pulled him off his feet (an offence worth a six or seven on that scale I mentioned earlier!), then maybe he could be forgiven for thinking he could get away with what he did against Salah? Who knows maybe if he’d grabbed a handful of his shirt at the same time he would have!
I’m not going to be crying foul and saying that our relegation is down to bad officiating if and when it comes and, trying to see the bigger picture, I readily acknowledge that the first of the several woeful decisions we saw in the Chelsea match came when Aron Gunnarsson got away with a shirt pull in his own penalty area so blatant that it was obvious to many in the crowd, but not, apparently, to Craig Pawson and his merry men.
This isn’t just about a Cardiff City fan feeling hard done by. Although I’m not wholly convinced by the best league in the world line we hear constantly, there is, far more importantly, an awful lot of people who are. However, I fail to see how the Premier League can be marketed as “the complete package” when the general standard of officiating is so poor and the structure which oversees them allows so much muddled thinking – it’s little wonder there were no English referees in last year’s World Cup in Russia.
