Morning folks – we all good? Or are you one of the many people slightly irritated by the ‘Refs mic’d up’ content Sky Sports pushed out last night featuring refereeing chief Howard Webb and, oddly, Michael Owen? On the Owen stuff, I’m not sure i’ve ever seen any kind of tactical insight worth him being paid for, so to have him running that particular show is a little odd to say the least. On the topic of discussion, which included a debate around the Kovacic assaults on the ankles of Arsenal players, there was also a fair bit of consternation amongst Gooners on my Twitter timeline last night. If you haven’t seen the comments, here’s a link:

https://x.com/SkySportsNews/status/1711816987175788797?s=20

Now, I’m actually all for this attempt at increasing transparency from the PGMOL, because at least we’re hearing from them after decades of the pathetic rule of Mike Riley in which it felt like they were accountable to nobody and had no recompense for what was a litany of repeatable errors amongst a bunch of useless referees. So the opening up and attempt at a bit more transparency by releasing the audio of mistakes, as well as Howard Webb coming up and fronting up on certain contentious issues, I am in favour of. The ‘ghost goal’ from the Scum v Liverpool game was a cataclysmic error, people got angry, but at least we now know what happened and hopefully lessons can be learned.

And from the Kovacic situation on Sunday, when I heard Howard Webb was going on to Sky Sports to talk about the incident, I was glad. If Howard Webb is going to give us an explanation on what happened then fair enough. If Michael Oliver didn’t see the full impact of the challenge then at least we know why he didn’t send Kovacic off. We might not like it, we might be annoyed at it, but we know why. But the problem with what Howard Webb said last night was when he started talking about having a ‘negative impact on the game’. That is why many of us have got a bit annoyed last night and why I’m writing about it this morning. Because when you add it to the Mike Dean debacle on Saturday that Merse brought up, as well as Mike Dean a month or so back stating that last season he didn’t want to make Antony Taylor’s life harder by calling him up on an incident when he’d already had a ‘tough game’, the optics look absolutely dreadful.

As many people have already pointed out on social media, Michael Oliver doesn’t want to negatively impact a game, but he had no problem in doing that with two yellow cards in eight seconds for Gabriel Martinelli when we played Wolves away the season before last. If that isn’t negatively impacting the game with quick and rash decision making, then what is?

He was also very quick to instantly dismiss the foul on Rice on Sunday, almost as quickly as he dished out two yellow cards to Martinelli two years ago, interestingly enough. Funny that. In a very UNFUNNY way.

Here I go with the consistency debate again though. You’ve heard it from me, you’ve heard it from others, you’ve heard it from everyone with an opinion on football, no doubt, but here we are once again. Quite why Howard Webb made that comment I’m not sure. I think I’d have preferred it if he’d have just said “I’ve spoken to Michael Oliver and his view was that it was a foul, but there was not enough contact from what he saw and of course VAR can’t intervene at that stage”. That feels like it’d have been a better way to go. Then the only issue is that VAR can’t say “Michael, you might just want to have another look at that”. That’s another issue in itself. If there is contact, if it looks nasty, then why can’t Oliver have a look at the replays? If he had’ve done, I’m 99.9% sure he would have sent Kovacic off.

But we don’t want games to be re-refereed!

I get that argument and sure, we don’t want them going over everything, but why can’t we then give some power to the referee to be able to ask his VAR? If Michael Oliver doesn’t have a great view of the incident – which is fair enough if somebody gets in the way, or if he’s not close enough to the action – why can’t he say “lads in the VAR, can I just check there was nothing untoward on that challenge”? Strikes me that if we gave them that power, then perhaps they would feel more inclined to use it.

I don’t keep as up to speed on the rules though and maybe he could have done that. Maybe he just didn’t bother, which in itself would be another issue related to the competency of the referees we have in this league. That’s a whole other debate for a whole other day that I don’t think I want to unpack right now. But we do need to see something changing at the PGMOL. Howard Webb is – to his credit – at least trying to bring in some transparency. But until he starts to bin off some of the useless officials we have running the game and starts to import some of the best referees from around the world for the best football league in the world, we’re going to keep having these problems crop up.

Right, I think that’s probably enough ranting for one day. Time to head off to the Big Smoke for a day of work in the City.

Have a good one peeps.