Poor Officiating - Are We Surprised?

Football officials are genuinely clueless, do you really blame the 'keeper?



This is the problem with not allowing referees to use common sense or be allowed to have played the game to a decent standard.

Referee Strikes Back

They must be an awful side since they can't even catch an overweight ref:



Pathetic dive by the player too.

Brighton v Liverpool

Ray Wilkins summed it up when he said near the end "Some of the Brighton players are getting annoyed because the game is being refereed differently to a normal Championship game".

Brighton did well, certainly in the second half, but had it been Suarez instead of Will Buckley who'd gone down at the slightest push in the first half the referee would have given a penalty. I'm not saying that it was a penalty, but...

Referees need to be ex-players, and the current system doesn't allow for that. In cricket you can't now become a professional umpire unless you've been a professional player - they know all the tricks of the trade and get fooled less easily. Why can't the same happen in football.

It seems that football thinks that it's so big and clever that they don't have to do anything that might actually improve the game. Not only am I citing referees here but the use of technology. The fear is that it will slow the game down, but in actual fact, all sports that have embraced technology (rugby, cricket etc) have just made it part of the game.

Football has become too big for its own boots and needs to rapidly get with the sporting script before it's too late. There will be a time when football will rue the day they didn't embrace TV replays to help the officials.