“Blame Referee”

Reading The Football League Paper on the tube home, I couldn’t help but notice the proliferation of complaints about refereeing this weekend.

The further on I read, the more managers I found to be lambasting decisions, or lack thereof, from their appointed referees. From The Championship to League 2, it started to feel like every other game had a poorly performing official.

Starting off at Portman Road, Mick McCarthy gave both barrels to journalists waiting after the game.

“Informed that counterpart McClaren had hailed the ref’s performance, McCarthy laughed. ‘Well if that’s what he thinks, I’ll have to give him these,’ he said reaching for his reading glasses.
“Come on. The game has gone. Let’s come out here and say it how it is. Is it a f*cking penalty? Yes. Is it a f*cking foul? Yes. He’s got his arm out here. The ball hits his hand, it’s a penalty.
“With the Eustace one, I asked the referee at half-time what was going on. He said it was an accidental collision. Well I have to tell you – I’ve had some accidental collisions in my time, It’s violent conduct. He body-checks him from the side. He’d been booked already and he would have had to go off. It was a very strange decision.”

This mood of fury and disbelief set the precedent for what was to follow throughout the rest of the Saturday afternoon press conferences.

Neil Lennon followed suit in criticising his referees penalty calls – however he did manage to bite his tongue better than McCarthy bothered to.
“I’m not convinced it was a penalty, in fact I’m not convinced ours was a penalty either, so you can obviously read my thoughts on the referee’s performance overall.”

The Gills stand-in coach, Steve Lovell, was disappointed with their penalty decision:
“I thought the penalty was a bit of a soft one and the referee didn’t have the best afternoon in the world but that’s all I’m going to say about it.”

Both managers condemned a penalty call at XX as Barnsley scored a controversial penalty against Yeovil Town. Barnsley’s Danny Wilson agreed the goalkeeper “got a touch on it.”

Yeovil’s Gary Johnson stated: “We think it was two bits of unprofessionalism. One from our player to get sent off because that was stupid… the other is the penalty. We had two at Bristol City over Christmas hat we know aren’t penalties after seeking clarification.
“And we believe this will be another one that the officials will end up telling us wasn’t a penalty.”

Dean Smith of Walsall was furious with his referee’s performance in their 4-1 defeat against Scunthorpe.
“I’ve seen it again as well and it’s never a penalty. It’s cost us the chance of getting back into a game that I thought we were getting back into.
“He couldn’t give the earlier one quick enough either – he looked almost disappointed that he didn’t have to give it. To be honest I wasn’t even angry about it – I felt sorry for him more than anything because I thought it was such a poor decision.”

Leyton Orient manager, Fabio Liverani, was so incensed by a foul on Bradley Pritchard that he found himself sent to the stands. Being away from the dugout wasn’t enough to cool the Italian’s mood ahead of the post-match press conference, as he unleashed:
“The match has been badly conditioned by the referee’s decision. It’s impossible to say anything to my players after that because the referee got it wrong.
“Certainly it was our mistake for the goal, not the referee’s and we didn’t have a very good first half. But besides the first 30 seconds we played in my opinion very good football in the second-half.”

Bradford’s Phil Parkinson gave another no-holds-barred post-match interview, after seeing his side lose 2-1 to Rochdale.
“They’ve got a penalty and he’s been sent off – it’s never a sending off, it’s an absolutely atrocious decision. We knew it was at the time, and when you see it again it looks worse.
“It summed up the referee’s performance – he was terrible on the day. I won’t hide away from it, there was a pitch inspection this morning and he was telling me how he’s come up from Surrey. If that’s the best ref we can get and we’ve brought him up from Surrey the God help us. That performance was shocking.”

Latics manager Lee Johnson blamed solely the officials for his team’s draw with Doncaster.
“The game changed on some poor officiating. Sometimes you get three of four poor decisions but in fairness it was probably more 18 or 19. It’s not a great challenge from [Joseph] Mills, but the manner in which the officials dealt with it was very, very poor.”

Portsmouth lost to a Newport goal they believed should have been judged as offside. Andy Awford commented:
“It’s difficult to take. I’m as honest as the day is long and if the players don’t do enough they get a kick up the backside, but they did enough. I’ve got to be careful what I say because I don’t want to get fined, but we’ve been done by something out of our hands, which is disappointing.”

Neal Ardley held the referee to account for AFC Wimbledon’s side’s 2-1 defeat at Stevenage.
“It doesn’t surprise me that the penalty went that way, I thought the officiating all game was awful. It was a scrappy, tough League 2 game and I thought in the end he was giving bad decisions for us to counteract the ones he’d given against us.”

It felt unlikely that refereeing on the whole was this error-strewn throughout the Saturday 3 o’clock’s. So what does that say for the conduct of the managers?

Make no mistake, no winning managers had a bad thing to say about the refereeing. In fact, on a couple of occasions (notably Newport’s Justin Edinburgh and Stevenage’s Graham Westley, for a correct penalty call and offside decision, respectively) there was room for post-match praise for the jobs of their officials.

For the losing managers, are they using the referees as a scapegoat for other issues, and poor performances across 90 minutes; is it so simple that one decision defined the course of the match – or is it just more convenient to summarise it that way? Could they perhaps be using their post-match pressers to equally criticise systems, tactics and players – of course they could. It’s just far easier to deflect blame and hang that particular hat on the official, who rarely has a voice to answer with.

Saturday 10th was certainly a bad day at the office for the men in black – be it because they were at fault, or because they had to simply shoulder the blame anyway.