A zealous and over-literal refereeing culture is undermining the authority of officials whether they make mistakes or notJanny Sikazwe made a mistake and ended up blowing for full time after 85 minutes of Wednesday’s Africa Cup of Nations meeting between Mali and Tunisia. Forgetting to stop the watch during a water break (if that is what happened) is an understandable error – particularly given he was subsequently taken to hospital suffering from heatstroke – and one that could easily have been rectified.As it was, though, Sikazwe, an experienced referee who took charge of the 2017 Cup of Nations final as well as Belgium v Panama and Japan v Poland at the 2018 World Cup, looked rattled. He sent off Mali’s...
Comparative judgment used in marking essays could improve decisions in football and help restore common senseHow should an essay be marked? You might think a teacher should simply read it and make a judgment based on the impression it makes: logically coherent, offers evidence to back up its case, reads well, is original – feels like an A. But that, obviously, is risky. It’s subjective. What stirs one assessor might not appeal to another.So maybe there needs to be an agreed rubric. The essay must cover certain key points, achieve certain goals. But the danger then is that essays become box-ticking exercises, that a student could doggedly go through the checklist and achieve top marks despite making little sense: or...
The season’s early weeks were relatively quiet but subsequent mishaps show VAR controversy is not going away yetFor a couple of weeks, it looked as if they’d nailed it. A fortnight into the new season and there had been barely a murmur of complaint about referees or their video assistants. Urged to let the game flow, all available evidence from the Premier League suggested referees were doing exactly that.Even the lines used to determine offsides had been revolutionised (translation: made slightly thicker) in order to put an end to ridiculous decisions determined by rogue toenails and armpits. “Effectively we have given back 20 goals to the game that were deemed offside last season,” said Mike Riley, the referees chief, who...
After three decades reporting on the game for the Observer and Guardian, I’m bowing out. Here’s a parting shot, along with a few cherished memoriesWhen I joined the Observer in 1990 the country was just rediscovering its love of the national game, thanks to Gazza’s tears and the BBC’s cultured coverage of Italia 90 drawing a line under the careless 1980s, a decade when one horrific disaster after another followed from the general assumption that football supporters were a troublesome subspecies barely worth anyone’s care and attention.In a couple more years the advent of the Premier League would massively increase the game’s prosperity and visibility, allowing grounds to be made safer and more attractive to a wider section of society....
Without crowd noise to influence them, statistics indicate referees are less inclined to make decisions favouring the hostsSo this is what football looks like for the foreseeable future. No handshakes, spitting, or fans. Balls doused in disinfectant before kick-off. Masked substitutes physically distancing in stands. Mandatory temperature checks for the lucky few allowed into stadiums. The game sealed off and sanitised, as if in the midst of a science experiment. All that is missing is hazmat suits.But watching the Bundesliga’s return there was a vague sense of something else: that the action itself was also not the same without supporters cajoling, haranguing and singing hosannas. On social media some reckoned the games were more like pre-season friendlies, slower and less...