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In the light of recent events, when PGMOL can’t seem to make up their mind what the laws of the game are, it’s worth going back to April 2012. A few of us were invited to the Etihad to meet Mike Riley, who was doing a presentation and Q&A. The context is important here.
Lee Mason had been withdrawn from one of our games at short notice. The official reason was family illness but I’d heard different (& I’m not going there). Mason had been involved in a very controversial incident a few days earlier, in a game at Old Trafford involving QPR.
They, with Bolton, Blackburn, Wigan & Wolves, were in the relegation dogfight. Early on Ashley Young had been offside, which wasn’t flagged, dived to win a penalty and the QPR defender (Shaun Derry) was sent off for Denial of a Clear Goalscoring Opportunity (aka DOCGSO).
Riley started off talking about how refs were selected for games & described 3 criteria. Each ref had to declare their allegiances plus their close families and therefore couldn’t ref that club or an obvious rival. So a City supporting ref (ha!) couldn’t ref United for example.
Riley’s example was that Lee Mason’s brothers watched Bolton. Remember that. Then he said a ref couldn’t ref a team within their own County FA association, meaning a Manchester FA ref couldn’t do United or City. Finally, he said, there should be no obvious conflict of interest.
It was quickly pointed out to him that a ref whose declared allegiance involved Bolton, who were in a relegation fight with QPR, was surely a fairly large conflict of interest. You could see in his face that he hadn’t thought about that and understandably he didn’t elaborate.
I asked about DOCGSO, saying I thought it had been introduced to punish players who brought down an attacker just outside the area, to avoid a penalty, as a Dutch player did to an England player in an international. Why penalise a team twice for a penalty offence in the area?
My point was that, by giving the penalty, you’d restored the goalscoring opportunity so the defending player hadn’t actually denied that. It took Riley a little while to grasp the point I was making but eventually it sunk in. His reply revealed the level of thinking at PGMOL.
“We discussed that” he said, “but concluded that a defender would simply wait until the opposition player was in the area before fouling them, so they’d avoid a red card”. We all laughed at that and pointed out that in that case you could give a penalty. He still didn’t get it.
I had a chat to him afterwards & he was a really nice guy, but the meeting opened my eyes to the level of critical thinking at the top level of the game. Or rather the lack of it, and I think it explains a lot about the mess they continually get themselves into at PGMOL Towers.
