Aside from the angry outbursts of humiliated Arsenal fans, the post-match furore from Arsenal’s trip to Chelsea on Saturday 22nd March centred largely on the sending off of Arsenal’s Kieran Gibbs, fifteen minutes into the game.
Arsenal were two, soon to be three, nil down to their London rivals when Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain made a dive that team-mate and goalkeeper Wojciech Szczesny might have been proud of, had his palming of the oncoming ball by the goal-line not forced referee Andre Mariner to blow for a penalty.
Mistaking the identity of the handballing villain, however, Mariner showed Kieran Gibbs the subsequent red card instead of Oxlade-Chamberlain – despite the latter repeatedly telling Mariner that it was him.
In terms of the match the mix-up barely mattered. Arsenal were well on their way to being stuffed before being reduced to ten men, and had Oxlade-Chamberlain gone off instead of Gibbs the result would hardly have been any different.
More than anything, the false dismissal once again questioned the referee’s capacity to observe and judge key events of the game, as well as reopening the barely sealed can of worms entitled ‘technology in football’.
With no ill-feeling directed towards Andre, he and his colleagues are prone to messing things up every now and then.
It’s extremely easy to sit in the stands at a football match, or on our sofas at home, and disagree with everything a referee is doing, telling him that he’s an idiot and should have gone to Specsavers, while we watch the game with the sincere opinion that we would control the game better than the man in the middle.
We frequently assume, as Pat Nevin suggested shortly after the incident, that the ref is bereft of mental capacities expected of any adult, let alone a referee: “I feel quite sorry for the referee, who didn’t see it. But Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain was telling him it was him. Use a bit of common sense, surely?”
However, Graham Poll, ever the public’s insightful eye into the mysterious mental processes of football’s officials, was quick to defend Mariner’s actions. “You can’t reverse a decision based on what a player says to you. If we’re at 1-1 in the semi-final of the World Cup, Wayne Rooney gets involved in a heated debate or violent confrontation with an opponent, and the referee says ‘I’m sending you off’ – the left back might come over and say ‘No it was me ref’, because he wants to keep Wayne on, as he might score the winning goal in the World Cup final.”
“You have to go on what you’ve seen, what you believe you’ve seen, unless there’s evidence to the contrary. The only evidence you can get is from one of your other officials, or from video.”
Refereeing demands empirical evidence: an official cannot simply take another player’s word for it, and so must rely on what he believes he’s seen. It is easy to forget that, thanks to Sky and co., we have an unobstructed view of the action and can replay it as many times as we like – when you’ve got what really happened replayed and zoomed in on in your front room, it isn’t hard to make referees appear as though they ‘don’t know what they’re doing’.
There is a view among some fans, players and managers who believe (to borrow the words of Everton boss Roberto Martinez) that ‘errors, misjudgements and mistakes’ are merely ‘part of football, and you need to accept it because that is what makes football what it is’. Yet in the modern game, a referee’s decision makes the difference between gaining or losing millions of pounds, as well as between ecstasy or deep sorrow.
Whatever one’s opinion is on the increase in investment in the game, it must be accepted that vast amounts of money are now ‘part of football’ and are responsible for making the Barclays Premier League ‘what it is’. Sky has not only given us the technology to rewind and pause live action – they have also contributed to the vast wealth available to Premier League clubs. As a result, the demands on the limited visual capabilities of the human referee are greater than ever before.
The FA maintained its commitment to empirical-based evidence by allowing Mariner to referee a Premier League game the following weekend. But until they extend this commitment to the introduction of video-technology to assist with refereeing decisions, officials will continue to be seen as idiots lacking in common sense, as the 21st century, Sky+-ready eyes of the spectator remain vastly superior to the eyes by which the game is actually officiated.
