Video: Respect the ref? As soon as he stops awarding goals like this one
Attwell: Back of the net or side of it - either will do
An unexpected side effect of the Respect the Ref campaign has been the joy in pointing out examples of refereeing errors that are so bad that it makes respect impossible and just refraining from running onto the pitch and slapping him senseless with a sweaty shin pad is the best one can do.
As examples of bad decisions go, they don´t get much better than the goal awarded by Stuart Attwell in the 2-2 draw between Watford and Reading. The Royals were handed a point when the match officials contrived to award a goal when the ball had not been anywhere near the net.
The 25-year-old ref awarded the goal to Reading on the advice of assistant Nigel Bannister. The ball had in fact gone out of play for a corner. Unfortunately, when Mr Bannister saw the ball cross the line he obviously thought he had seen net in front of it. The video evidence proves conclusively that he was wrong – and that is the understatement of the century.
Watford manager Adrian ´Mulder´Boothroyd came over all X-Files post-match. He said: “I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s like a UFO landing, a mistake like that.”
This particular refereeing mistake is so bad that it is laughable. But with the majority of managers on best behaviour, incidents like this do give an insight into the frustrations faced by coaches. Watch the video below to judge for yourself whether Attwell deserves your respect….
Respect Stuart Attwell
Im not too worried about the decision given against stoke, we, as a big club will get more decisions for us than against us. The one at the Reading match is absolutely ridiculous.
How ’bout some respect for the video ref ?
Liverpool_Fan, “we, as a big club will get more decisions for us than against us” – so, this means everything is right, right ? Shame on you. I wish you to loose this year’s UCL position by a mistake against you in favor of a bigger club. Say ManU, cause I know you Liverpool fans particularly like them.
The problem isn’t the refs; there will always be mistakes in games, and this one just happens to be more glaring than other mistakes. But it’s no less a travesty (perhaps too strong a word there) than when a offside goal is allowed to stay, or a goal is ruled out incorrectly.
The real problem is that there’s no mechanism for dealing with contentious decisions that happen to be wrong. The premier league has got such a huge amount of money they should surely be able to fund a project to develop some sort of technology to determine this accurately. I don’t recall if Hawkeye is actually working right, or if it got canned, but that’s a step on the right idea.
Football is the only major sport that doesn’t have some sort of backup system, and it’s absolutely ridiculous.
Leave the refs alone, they are doing an incredibly difficult job and aren’t getting any support from the FA or Premier League. If they weren’t required to make split second decisions that stuck, perhaps there’d be less pressure and you’d find them making more correct calls, since they could always rely on the hypothetical technological backup to correct any mistakes they make.
Why don’t they come out and say it then ? AFAIK, generally the refs are against the idea of video help. The only high-profile football people who have openly asked for it are some top technicians.