Who'd be a ref?

[1690 Posts 71]

EFFECTING conciliation between the Taliban and Anglo-American forces may be only slightly more onerous than attempting to create a climate in which referees and football club managers can achieve mutual sympathy, understanding, tolerance and harmonious co-existence.

Undeterred by the seeming futility of the task, however, Donald McVicar, the SFA's head of referee development, set this ambition in motion by inviting all 12 SPL managers to a Hampden meeting with leading match officials on the day of Scotland's match against Northern Ireland.

Nine of the invitees attended, the others prevented by inescapable prior commitments, but sending club representatives in their place. A number of players also helped swell the numbers at the assembly. By the finish, there were no reported casualties.

McVicar, in fact, insisted that the meeting had been quite fruitful, while admitting that accretions of animosity, building over decades of conflict, were unlikely to be obliterated in the course of a single afternoon. In practical terms, steps are to be taken to address at least one consistently contentious area.

McVicar and his officials are to establish a protocol to deal with the issue of players putting the ball out of play to allow an apparently injured party to have treatment. This is a practice that has become a potential flashpoint in the past few years and one for which referees themselves, having in many cases abdicated their responsibility for deciding when play should be stopped, are due some blame.

"We realise that has crept in," said McVicar, "and that's one reason why we want to get back to stressing to managers and players that the referee has the authority to halt play and that he will decide when it is appropriate to do so. The practice of players taking it upon themselves by knocking the ball out of play has allowed some to try to take advantage by feigning injury and that's unacceptable." The commonest obstacle to accord between the factions is almost certainly managers' and players' ignorance of the Laws of the Game. This flaw is frequently – and, of course, unwittingly – exposed in post-match press conferences when a manager and/or a player complains of an injustice, his argument rooted in a total lack of understanding of the relevant law.

Not that referees are faultless, of course, but the grievousness of their mistakes does tend these days to be exaggerated by the myriad camera angles that turn a common error of judgment into an embarrassment. No amount of sweet talk between the two sides, however, could hope to eliminate the mind-bending effect on managers of a decision they believe has had a crucial impact on the outcome of a match.

When manager of Celtic, the late Tommy Burns, the saintliest of men when not involved in the heat of the action, was seen one day leaping from the dug-out and sprinting the length of the touchline to harangue a linesman – at this point stationed close to the corner flag – and a referee over what he believed to be an unacceptable decision.

Later, television having shown the officials' judgment to be impeccably correct, he was asked in private what had entered his head to provoke such a reaction. "I know, I know," said a clearly contrite Tommy, who added a startling confession. "The thing is, I didn't even see the incident. It was just the guys in our dug-out jumped up protesting and that was enough for me. Suddenly, I was off and running. Mad, isn't it?"

Craig Brown, arguably the most rational and even-tempered manager in the history of the game, recalls with utter bewilderment his experience during a match at Forfar when he was in charge of Clyde.

"It was one of those horrible, horrible nights, the rain lashing down," says the former Scotland manager. "At one point, I found myself face to face with the referee, giving him dog's abuse and ending up with the words, 'You've lost the place here, ref.' He looked at me from head to toe and replied, 'I'VE lost the place?'

"It was only then that I looked down and realised that I was standing in the centre circle, wearing a dress suit and crocodile leather shoes, which were by this time out of sight, having sunk into the mud up to my ankles.

"To this day, I have no idea how I got there, no recollection of leaving the technical area and tramping all the way out to the centre circle."

Anyone from the world of refereeing who can come up with a cure for that kind of insanity is wasting his time in football.

-----

Scotsman