What's the problem with female officials?

Sky Sports commentators Andy Gray and Richard Keys were caught on microphone debating the merits (or lack thereof) of female officials at the Wolves versus Liverpool game at the weekend. They clearly didn’t realise the microphones were on because their comments were not the kindest.

So what’s the problem with female officials in any sport? Nothing in my view, the problem is that games such as football and cricket have been male dominated for so long that some find it difficult to accept that a female official could be competent or even better than a male official – some would perish the thought.

I have played in both football and cricket matches with both female and male officials, and regardless of gender they have made good decisions and poor decisions. In fact, one of the best refereeing displays I’ve seen was by a woman, and one of the worst was by a man being mentored by an ex-Premier League referee with the idea being to fast-track him into the football league.

What the likes of Gray and Keys have forgotten is that football (and other sports) are now far more widely played, and therefore understood by women. Cricket has also seen a huge injection of money and resources recently and girls/ladies teams are far more commonplace. Ironically Gray and Keys were debating whether the assistant in question, Sian Massey knew “the offside rule”. This immediately highlight’s their own ignorance of the game in that football doesn’t actually have rules but laws. Only competitions have rules. The same applies in cricket, and I was once booked for pointing this out to a referee. He never registered the booking with the FA, surprisingly enough.

What people need to focus on in all sports is not the gender of participants or officials, but their competence and ability to perform the function they have been asked to do. Week in, week out there are contentious decisions made by officials in both football and cricket, generally made by men. The fact that cricket is trying to minimise human error by using Hawk Eye and other technology and football is desperate to resist it only goes to show that football is unwilling to move with the times.

It will be interesting to see what happens, if anything, about the two Sky men, but they very quickly offered apologies, clearly realising that they had at the very least dipped a toes into some extremely hot water.