Dogawful Officiating

[gjohnson]

On 18/11/2024 at 21:37, Kaizero said:

 

They don't make 'em like him anymore  

 

My favorite trivia about Collina is how he was the only active Serie A referee during the match fixing scandal that the match fixers couldn't turn, no matter how much money they tried to buy him with. When money didn't work, their next move was to pay a player to "accidentially" tackle and injure Collina, allowing for a bribed referee to ref the games he'd miss because of that injury... they got no takers, as even though they'd been bribed to fix matches already and seemingly had no fear of being caught doing that, they all feared Collina so much that nobody dared go near him   

He wouldn't even have to shout at players just give that stare....you know the one that makes him look like the guy from 'the hills have eyes'. As in he'd chop your arm off and eat it in front of you...

[ChrisMcQuillan]

Quote

The Sun newspaper claims Coote booked then-Leeds player Ezgjan Alioski in a match against West Brom in October 2019, then messaged a friend saying: "I hope you backed as discussed"; FA says it is "investigating as a matter of urgency"

 

[Dancing Brave]

10 minutes ago, ChrisMcQuillan said:

 

 

[toon25]

Coote a convenient fall guy seemingly. Doubtless not the first to be doing this sort of shit, and certainly won't be the last.

[Yorkie]

I mean the full exchange does just sound like banter as opposed to some grave misdemeanour. If the booking was justified then the "I hope you" line just sounds like a nod to their earlier conversation, and the coincidence of it actually happening. The other person didn't even place the bet.

 

So dim to put it in writing, mind. 

[Miercoles]

3 hours ago, Dancing Brave said:

 

 

Jesus fuck, listening to that guy talk was brutal. I feel eight years older now.

[Kaizero]

As I feel obliged to have my agency sometimes publish content online to maintain some relevance on SoMe platforms and search results, I wrote a short piece about fans protesting VAR: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7268176316275838977/

 

tl;dr cliffnotes are that the reasons fans are protesting have genuine validity, but that they aren't actually protesting the actual culprit for their dislike of VAR - which eventually could lead to football as a whole becoming much worse than it is today. FIFA having hustled their way into IFAB not being able to pass any revisions/additions/removals to the Laws of the Game without their vote has, since it happened, continually made the game worse every year following the annual IFAB board meeting.

 

The EC this summer was the perfect example of this, as the outrage fans showed against VAR turned into a fire that ended up continually having gasoline poured onto it by the media looking to turn the outrage against VAR incidents into clicks and ad revenue. In reality, however, EC 2024 was the most accurately refereed international competition in history. What fans were actually enraged about wasn't VAR, it was the referees utilizing VAR to correctly apply the Laws of the Game - which at the time had just been given its annual post-IFAB board meeting update, which included an even larger amount of mind-boggling rule revisions and additions than it usually does.

 

Granted, fans can't exactly be expected to, once a year, read through ca. 230 A4 pages worth of rules and regulations that referees need to be aware of so they can enforce them in every professional competitive football match across the globe  It's about the same length as The Great Gatsby, but instead of reading about a mysterious millionaire with an obsession to reunite with his former lover, it's bullet point after bullet point in dry, bland, language that flows just as fluently to a reader as the Terms & Conditions text everyone ignore when they click "accept".

 

If fans want to see football improve, they shouldn't be doing it through a VAR witch hunt - they should burn the actual witches, IFAB, at the stake.