When are we getting bark-chippings installed?

To the foot stomping outrage of some fans, there exists statistical evidence which points to the fact that United don’t concede less, or win more penalties at home than other clubs, so we can finally put the myth that refereeing decisions favour the big clubs to bed can’t we? The stats say so. Night, night, don’t let the bed bugs bite … *alarm clock*

From my own perspective what the endless, ‘yes they do’/’no they don’t’ repetitions in this particular line of discourse (discourse being a polite way of saying petulant bickering) fail to address, for the most part, is the actual problem (although I wouldn’t say that this failure is in any way exclusive to this debate in particular, unfortunately).

I have no doubt whatsoever that the ‘bigger clubs’ get preferential treatment, as, as a general rule, the bigger the club is perceived to be the more fans they will attract and have in attendance for their matches. Those fans in turn will make considerably more noise than those of the visiting ‘smaller club’ (or at least be in ownership of the potential to be louder, when called upon). Why would we imagine that in any given situation a borderline decision wouldn’t go in the favour of the majority, i.e. those who shout the loudest?  Before you start picking holes (holes I’ve left there intentionally of course) that’s not my entire argument, and not even the real argument, so nerr.

The ‘bigger clubs’ also, by their very nature, attract the ‘biggest managers’. Those managers with the biggest reputations, biggest egos, biggest celebrity and therefore the biggest opportunity to sway opinion with choice words. Again, why would we imagine that in any given situation a fifty-fifty wouldn’t go in favour of Sir Alex and Manchester United; knowing full well that if it didn’t then SAF would make damned sure the world knew about it?

"Excuse me! I refuse to speak to Bifurcated.co.uk ever again."

Despite a curious public perception, referees aren’t autonomous, they are employed and trained by the footballing authorities.  Referees are human beings like some of us, they’re someone’s son or daughter, their primary functions, wants and needs are similar to ours –  some of them even have feelings. Imagine being trapped in an enclosed space with twenty four people who had no respect for you or what you represent. In addition, at least 80% of those people will be completely impetuous arseholes with a propensity towards violent acts. Just to make things a little trickier, why not imagine that all your exit points from this uncomfortable space are being guarded by 50,000 people, who not only empathise entirely with the arseholes, but encourage them.

I asked myself this (tongue in cheek) question a while back for another article, the working title of which was, ‘Why is the game still entirely at the mercy of the whim of a select few, often unhinged, unquestionably unfit, pathological egotists often found in excruciatingly tight black shorts (a subtle attempt by the manufacturers to remove them from the gene pool)?’ Although not overtly apparent from that particular sentence perhaps, my conclusion was that I absolutely feel that referees are the fall guys for the inadequacies of the governing body’s outdated and unedifying maneuverings (with no intention of insinuating that I’ve stumbled across some new revelation, which again is part of the problem).

Football bosses have not empowered referees, or supplied them with the correct tools to deal with football and all it’s nuances and intricacies. They show no support before, during, or after events, even washing their hands of flash points entirely on occasion. They just leave them firefighting, at the mercy of whoever wants to take a shot. With such a shocking display of abandonment of their duty of care to their employees, I’m surprised more referees don’t strike or even sue.

"I'm not listening, I've just super-glued my hand to my head?"

There is a faction of the political left that have politely bastardized a Gerald Massey quote, which equates to, “Take the truth as authority, not the authority as truth”. When super-imposed over the problems we encounter weekly with effectively officiating the game from top down, or bottom up, it makes sense (as it does politically) and enables those charged with refereeing to be afforded a fighting chance. Currently the authority in football provides us with our ‘truth’. A decision is made based on their rules, with no flexibility to adjust when things occur beyond those rigid parameters. The conclusion (or ‘truth’) in this instance does not provide justice, and so to approach it differently; when you discover the truth about any given incident in football, whether that be during, after, two weeks after, or two years after, you respond appropriately, you allow the truth to lead the action that deals with the event (forming the authority).

It’s very simple. The grey areas that make the above seem like the unrealistic ramblings of a pleb,  are only grey because the laws aren’t strong enough in one sense, yet are entirely inflexible in an other. MAKE THE LAWS STRONG ENOUGH IN ONE SENSE, AND YET FLEXIBLE IN ANOTHER! Eradicate the grey by re-writing the rules which confuse and contradict. Replace the ones that don’t make practical sense. When they’re good and ready they could even consider making it even easier, and fairer, by introducing technology.

In the current footballing climate, if I were a referee, I know what I’d be telling the governing bodies to do with their whistle.

I’d like to ask all of you to watch the Yves Hinant, Eric Cardot and Lehericy Delphine 2009 documentary entitled, The Referees before entering into any ‘my gran could do better’  hackneyed grumblings in the future. It’s a true testament to just how difficult the job is (you can also have a good old titter at Howard Webb’s short-comings if that’s what you’re into).

There is also an alternative theory: Ssssshhh … It’s a conspiracy

.

In the last four or five games I’ve watched on as at least three thirds of the incidents, where players have “come together” on the pitch, have resulted in an embarrassing display of creative simulation – or as it used to be referred to as, cheating.

*Diving claxon*

It’s not just in the case of aggressive “comings together”, where it seems more commonly accepted, but you see it in the simplest of block tackles or merest of accidental boob grazes. Players exaggerating movement, conjuring up a “second movement”, or grimacing whilst clasping an apparently shattered appendage, with no other intention but to prosper through misleading the match officials, and us lot, still watching, in spite of all the detritus they force us to wade through and swallow.

*Diving claxon*

We’ve come a long way since we could point our collective finger at baddies like David Ginola or Rivaldo and ridicule them, even laugh. I miss the simple joy of those days *cue montage of those days – oh wait the footage shows me being pretty pissed off then too*

*Diving claxon*

Anyway, it’s damned near all players from all the Premier League clubs, with the only notable exception to my knowledge being Antonio Valencia (I’m sure other clubs have their exceptions too). What’s worse – YES, IT GETS WORSE! – is how the problem has been developed through those who actively look out for, orchestrate and manipulate opportunities to dive. Ashley Young, as far as I’m aware, remains amongst his contemporaries, chief protagonist of this dark art. He’s like a human butterfly knife with fishing hook toes and tendrils for legs.

*You’ve broke the claxon*

It’s endemic. There is no mandate that any governing body could issue that would address this. They’ve created this problem through their inability to officiate the game, or empower others to do so correctly.

It started out funny, now the joke’s wearing thin.  Hopefully it’s true, that if you eat sh*t for long enough you’ll eventually develop a taste for it. If not I will be putting my foot through something appropriate and sending someone appropriate the bill.

Roman went for a dip to cool off.

Since leaving university in 2001 aged 22, I have managed, but for a few months here and there, to consolidate my position as a tiny component part within the wheels of commerce. During that period of time, and also taking into account the part-time and casual work I had while at secondary school, I’ve  worked out I’ve earned approximately £70,000 within my lifetime. 32 years to earn what some top players now earn in roughly 3 days. So, if the question is how much money is now in football?, in my own personal context, the answer I can now be satisfied with is: shed-loads.

And so we come to the main body of my post, the reason you’re here, unless you’re one of the Hacker83 hacking crew who are most likely here for my HTML code (Gerrraaadovit you swine! Go on clear off!).

What with all the oligarchs, sheikhs, conglomerates, multinationals and other dodgy bastards investing in football and thus creating a multi-billion pound industry, why is the whole house of cards left at the mercy of the whim of a select few, often unhinged, unquestionably unfit, pathological egotists often found in excruciatingly tight black shorts (a subtle attempt by the manufaturers to remove them from the gene pool)?

Who am I?

When Jack Rodwell was sent off in the Merseyside Derby and then subsequently had his red card rescinded, I immediately thought what a fine job his agent and management team had done in getting him into the headlines and on to the back pages just before we all forgot who he actually was … I also thought that’s not fair. I didn’t stamp my feet whilst crying, cos it didn’t happen to a United player, but I would have, if it would have.

We’ve had ghost goals, handball goals, offside goals, onside goals, through the side-netting goals and through the stanchion goals. We’ve had penalties given, penalties not given, penalties given against Given and Given givin penalties away that are given and then ungiven. We’ve had diving, thumping, slapping, gouging, pinching, grabbing, suplexes and boston crabs. We’ve had just about every kind of wrongful decision and prospering cheat replayed on loop, to death, until we’ve come to accept them as ‘part of the game’, all of it packaged and presented reasonably neatly via the magic box … our telly.

Just guessing – cos I can’t be bothered to Google it – but I imagine that statistically 100% of football fans of professional clubs at some point in an average week watch football on telly (coverage through a camera, streamed, whatever). We all know what telly is, it’s been around for the best part of 100 years. We view the matches and opinion through it and therefore it becomes, possibly in most cases, our primary tool for facilitating our judgments and possibly in some part contextualising those judgements. It’s not unusual to see at least 2 or 3 controversial incidents during a game. Unfortunately, we see it,  but the referee doesn’t. If the referee was watching it on telly, then he sees it too and he avoids making the wrong choice. If we were on the pitch and not watching on the telly, we wouldn’t see it and the referee watching at home would perhaps call us a pleb. It’s a very straight forward premise.

Genuine footage of friends watching footy.

Although in a slightly different context (which I am conveniently ignoring), Fergie said it the other week, Telly is god; omnipotent and omnipresent – the all seeing eye. In being a god himself, he knows what he’s talking about. I was constantly reminded at school that ‘it takes one to know one’.

Instead of investing money in goal line technology, sensors in balls, extra cameras, or employing comatose ‘assistants’ to stalk the touchline behind the goal actively avoiding anything actually occurring within the confines of the playing surface. The governing bodies could do a lot worse than simply employ someone to watch the match on telly.

Oh Oh…I only turned over for a minute…again, again…

The company who get the rights to provide the footage that the ‘5th official-telly watcher’ views, inevitably sticks their logo all over the shop and so instead of FIFA, or whoever, having to fork out money on solutions, an actual revenue stream is created. Sepp Blatter said something about how the game is better with human errors, which I actually agree with. However, football fans engage with football on a different level to those people who are actually employed by it. It’s okay for us to say that the controversy adds to our enjoyment of it, like I do. I don’t lose my job or/and my sanity or/and my health just because the opposition forward was half a full length arm tattoo offside and put us out the cup.

Ner ner nee ner ner.

There are a couple of possible reasons as to why making the game fair doesn’t appeal. *Incoming speculative conclusion* a) The governing bodies of football don’t want things to change because with change comes evolution and ultimately the relinquishing of their power. b) The ‘investors’ in football I mentioned earlier without the opportunity to control the climate (ie. cheat, pay bungs etc) would more often than not be less likely to invest. I’m just going to leave this sentence here and you can choose to ignore it if you wish … The flawed officiating of the game creates the perfect platform for match fixing.

Imagine if what you saw on telly became what the match officials saw.

The technology is here and I use it every day of my life.

In 2005 our beloved Manchester United scrapped their women’s team because there was no financial sense in it continuing for the club. Forgetting thousands of years of institutionalised sexism (as a man, I’m well practiced in this), this is an important new factor in the stunted growth of the women’s game. Business, as football now is, for the most part does not often regard lateral thinking as an essential tool for its own perpetuation: if something is making you shed loads of money you carry on doing it. If it isn’t, you stop. The men’s game sees individual club revenues reaching consistently over 400 million. The women’s game does not. It’s of course hard to simply put a figure on how much it would cost to really push the women’s game, especially when there is an absolute absence of inclination, but it would be probably amount to no more than the average Premier League Chairperson’s pocket change.

Only one or two mainstream sports have a thriving women’s game, one of which is tennis. This is pure speculation and founded in nothing other than an uneducated guess, but this could be down to tennis throughout the century being a social ‘double-dating’ pastime for the middle and upper classes. Women were ‘allowed’ to play tennis. An alternative explanation for its near parity with the men’s game may actually be simply that it’s young females running around in short skirts. Whatever the reasons behind the success it provides evidence that women’s competitive sport can be lucrative.

When we stopped blinking for long enough and saw some women’s football coverage on TV in 2005, when the England team played in the European Championships hosted in this country, viewing figures averaged at around 2 million. Attendance at the grounds during the tournament averaged around the 20,000 mark. Both roughly just below a quarter of what the equivalent fixture achieved for the men during Euro 96. Albeit a big drop, this suggests that there is a ‘market’ for it. Most other sports would bite your hand off for those figures. There is money to be made.

Women have threatened to enter the men’s game but have been met with a reaction akin to that of a stag do infiltrated by an inquisitive fiancée. In 2003, Perugia were hoping to sign Birgit Prinz, a footballer for the national German women’s team. The Perugia president Luciano Gaucci said their investigation had led them to believe, “There was no regulation that would limit Birgit from playing with men”. He also felt the need to add, “She is very beautiful, and has a great figure. I can assure you that as a player, she’s very good.” I’ll let you pick yourself up off the floor and dust yourself off after that one. Birgit Prinz apparently declined the offer to join the club amid fears FIFA were about to throw their toys out the pram. The following year when Maribel Dominguez signed for Mexico’s second-division club Atletico Celaya, FIFA in a written statement acted swiftly, “The gender-separation principle in football should be maintained…this is laid down in league football and in international matches by the existence of gender-specific competitions, and the Laws of the Game and FIFA’s regulations do not provide for any exception…there must be a clear separation between men’s and women’s football”. Well, what did you expect? A clear, progressive, straight answer?

Of course, the women’s game does amble along in the background around the world. In America they give it a good go, but more often than not clubs claim they can’t maintain professional status due to poor revenue streams – which sadly means no-ones making enough profit from it, and not that it couldn’t be sustainable.

Here the Super League launch this year will see the financially stable women’s teams attempting to push the game into professional waters. The F.A however have already raised concerns about the financial climate and have admitted to struggling to find all the investment required. “We’ve got less money. We have to be clear about putting money behind priority programmes – and the Women’s Super League is a priority programme.”

Football is not run by historians, philosophers, psychologists, mathematicians nor scientists and so is not equipped to offer a solution to gender inequality. Sexism is not an issue football can tackle. It can assist somewhat if it changes it’s tact from sporadically mentioning the women’s game in brackets. But it won’t. It could, if it really, really wanted to, perpetually reinforce a well considered campaign of being a well adjusted institution. But it won’t.

You can’t undo His-Story.

Okay, so far off to a bad start. I am perhaps in need of a crash course in the science of self–enunciation, but please bear with me. I intend to ingratiate myself with you in the future and for this I will mostly be using the other distinguishing characteristics I have, in a very considered manner, decorated myself with during the past 32 years. For now though, these more appealing sides to my personality are secondary to the perversion and the bias I am sharing with you for the purposes of this article (apologies to those of you who tuned in presuming this was a frank confession from Sepp Blatter).

Wonderfully executed.

I was almost exclusively educated, at least in my formative years during the 80s, through hours and hours of watching telly until my eyes went square (believe the hype, kids). High on my weekly schedule were Knight Rider, Airwolf, The Littlest Hobo and Columbo, but it was The A-Team that was my absolute favourite. This being so, I developed a perversion for stories which have ‘goodies and baddies’. This perversion manifests itself in me taking great pleasure in specific incidents that are unique to football. Those incidents which, if they were to occur beyond the confines of a football stadium, would be viewed in a very different way. I’m talking about incidents such as the Zidane super head-butt on the pacifist, Materazzi and the wonderfully executed Cantona Kung-fu Kick on Palace fan and all round charitable fella, Matthew Simmons. There are a countless number of these ‘events’ where fans instinctively polarise to their preferred protagonist, choosing their ‘goody’ and ‘baddy’. They set their stall out in condemnation, vilification, dumbfoundedness, celebration, unfaltering loyalty and stoicism, all the emotions nature has delicately blessed us with (delete as appropriate). Within the minutiae of the subsequent debates fans define themselves beyond the usual ‘banter’ of supporting opposing clubs. This is where my perversion finds its gratification.

My bias has sneaked up on me somewhat over time. My only real pleasure when supporting United in the 80s came from thumbing through newspapers just to see if there were any pictures of Robbo, Sparky or Choccy (my three favourites at the time), to cut out and stick in my scrap book. I was blissfully unaware of rivalry or ‘the opposition’ as a concept at all. However, as a teenager struggling to fit into his own skin, this changed. I first remember developing a dislike (never hate, I’m a lover not a fighter) for baddies like Alan Shearer, Chris Sutton, Graeme Le Saux, Stuart Ripley, David Batty, Colin Hendry and Tim Sherwood not exclusively these players but they were the ones which were the main target of my pubescent (mild) vitriol. The players that have since followed in this lineage have been none other than those who ply their trade for clubs who are our archest of enemies at the given time. The current list comprises of most of the Chelsea squad (although, rather absurdly, not Drogba, more on this another time maybe). This of course is fuelled primarily by jealousy on my part, although it can also have its foundation in more reasonable assertions from time to time. It doesn’t matter how much United players ape the shameful, violent, questionable or embarrassing behaviours of their title challenging contemporaries. I will find a way of leaping heroically to their defence, at least on some level.

The Bard of Upton Park.

As an illustration of my bias in practice and how my perverse nature found nourishment from the ensuing mass-debate (ooh-er), there is probably no better example than when The Bard of Old Trafford imparted his angst-ridden, satirical commentary against the tyrannical stranglehold Sky has over his beloved sport at Upton Park (yep, when Wazza said ‘f*ck’ down the camera). As much as my assessment of this event is heavily weighted with a whimsical tongue-firmly-in-cheek, it is not far from an argument that I have had in Rooney’s defence. At my worst, I am inanely biased. For example, if Steven Gerrard (a baddy) would have done similar I would probably just ignore it or maybe think he was a really big twonk. That’s not to say I am incapable of differentiating between right and wrong and/or from the appropriating of statistical information within contexts of behaviour (neither am I incapable of kneejerk reaction). I just tend to prefer filtering this through my own personal perception of all this stuff, more often than not by taking it with a healthy pinch of salt, innit.

I would like nothing more as the credits begin to roll on this season – a season where we have (almost) successfully claimed our 19th title and potentially claimed another Champions League trophy – for the final scene to resemble thus: SAF, playing the part of Hannibal Smith, is pulling out a Havana Cigar of 1970s American car salesman proportions from his top shirt pocket and leaning back in his chair, lighting it. He raises his glass to Mourinho, who is sitting opposite playing the part of Templeton Peck ‘The Face Man’ and pouting in appreciation – the vainglorious sycophant (unfortunately the rest of the A-Team aren’t present, as Howlin Mad Murdoch has recently left the A-Team to form media group News Corp and Mr.T has been waiting in the Chinook to drop the Atomic Bomb on anyone who carried out a mundane task whilst neglecting their duty to become morbidly obese from over-eating chocolate bars). Fergie then proclaims smugly, “I love it (just love it) when a plan comes together!”