Rant

AN ARTICLE BY SUPERSUB

Just a bit of a ramble/muse/mini-rant (in places).

A bit of a time filler really, till the action gets underway this weekend

I’m sure I can’t be alone in this, but quite often when watching a game of football, certain events seem to be repeated over & over, which cause differing levels of irritation, depending on the context.

And they occur in near enough any game you care to mention & once you have summat that irritates you, confirmation bias kicks in & it/these seem to happen more & more frequently.

So it got me thinking, what laws/rules would I change & would that change be a)…easy enough to implement & b)…improve the game in some way for those watching.  So, here’s a short list of some things I’d like to see happen (or stop happening) during a game of football & whilst none of these would solve the particular problem completely, they’d certainly do no harm in my opinion, despite the acknowledgement that a tweak here or there may be needed to implement them.

What pisses one person off, is not always summat that annoys the next person, but maybe one or two of these do get on your nerves as well & you’ll almost certainly have examples of your own, that aren’t included here.

Referee’s Responsibility.   VAR has many issues, but one of them for me, is the amount of time that some decisions take & the number of people who are involved in making that decision. Referees standing in the middle of the pitch, whilst some invisible individual, often hundreds of miles away from the ground, makes a decision that could have MASSIVE implications on the outcome of a game or, indeed, a whole season & the destination of a major trophy.

VAR was introduced to help referees make correct decisions, so therefore (to me anyway) it should be down to the referee to have full responsibility for ALL major decisions, as much as is feasibly possible.

This one for me is easy to implement.  If a ref feels that there’s any kind of decision to be made about a goal/penalty/red card etc, they should immediately go across to the monitor & not have to wait to be called over.  The person in the ‘booth’ can then replay the incident for the ref as many times as needed & the ref can then be solely responsible for whatever decision is made, which is what referees have always been there for. They should have sole responsibility for decisions made during a game of football.

Basically, any time that a referee has gone over to a monitor, that should’ve been done immediately. We can see within seconds on the TV, if it looks like the ref is needed, so why can it take those in the booth several minutes sometimes….?   Call the ref over immediately (if they haven’t spotted summat themselves) & let them decide what needs to be done. 

If nothing else, it’ll save time overall & anyone who was at (or watching) our cup game vs WBA at Anfield a few seasons ago, has seen the extremes it can get to at times.

Referee’s Assistant’s Responsibility;  This one’s easy. If it looks offside, flag it.  Yes, some decisions will be wrong, but how many of these decisions does it take, to be worth risking serious injuries to the players, when there’s nothing to be gained or lost from a footballing perspective…??  I’d rather see multiple mistakes in semi-marginal offside decisions, than see one more player needlessly come to harm, or to be put at risk of such. 

Players & Referees;   This one’s quite simple too imo.  Any player that gestures towards the referee, in a way that indicates another player should be carded, immediately gets carded themselves.  And, in a similar situation, any players that approach the referee in an aggressive and/or confrontational manner, should also be immediately carded. They’d soon stop. Only team Captains should be allowed to approach the referee & any other player needs to stay the f*ck away.

Same applies during VAR decisions too, though if the ref has immediately gone over to the monitor, it’d be less likely that they’d be pestered by numerous players…….you’d think.

Time Wasting;   Give someone a stopwatch.  Goal celebrations, substitutions, plus free kicks & goal kicks for sides who are winning (or happily drawing) etc etc, stop the clock & add that time on at the end of the 45/90.  There’d be no point in time wasting then & the more goals that are scored in the 95^th & 96^th minutes (& beyond), the sides that do this regularly, will (hopefully) see how futile it is.

I can still vividly picture a game at Anfield in 18/19.  Newcastle had just beaten city & we played Leicester at Anfield the following evening (or that same week anyway). Huge parts of the 2^nd half, seemed to be taken up by Schmeichel going through an elongated routine for every goal kick. It was at least 30 seconds or more each time & they had quite a few goal kicks in the 2^nd half that night, as they were hardly in the Liverpool half for the vast majority of it.  If he had nothing to gain from that timewise, then he probably wouldn’t have taken so much of it in the first place. It was SO frustrating.

Final Whistle;  This is a new one & I’ve never seen this discussed before but……  It’s seconds away from the end of time added on, there’s a long ball over the heads of the defenders & an attacker has the run on them & will be through on goal, one on one with the keeper…..and the ref blows the final whistle (we’ve seen it ourselves).  I’d like to see summat akin to Rugby Union, where a whistle/klaxon (whatever) is blown & then the game ends as soon as the ball goes out of play which, in this case, would be whenever the ball goes out for a throw in.  I don’t see what harm this would do to the game & it would make for an exciting finish, with one team having one last chance to score & the other just wanting the ball out of play at times & it would avoid situations like mentioned above, which I think happened to mane last season at some point…?.

So, that’s about it for now. Just 5 things that, imo, would improve the game & specifically for those watching.  There’s quite a few more, but these are all ones that could be easily addressed with a little bit of thought and, whether anyone here agrees with them or not (some will & some won’t), they’re all ‘doable’ What simple changes would you like to see…?