The roll of referees

Why do referees exist?

imagine a game of football, any game, be it at school or champions league level, men’s or women's, without a referee.

first meaty challenge, debatable offside, the game would stop for long shouting matches between teams, chaos.

referees were invented to stop the constant bickering that would inevitably occur in any game of footy.

referees were invented as a necessary 3rd party figure that both teams accept as someone who enforces the rules/time of game etc.

Given that referees were invented as an outside figure whom both teams accept has final say on play and disputes, their stature should be respected and rightly or wrongly accepted, otherwise, chaos.

Mistakes happen, and we all take them as a slight to our teams, or conspiracies against us, but human beings make mistakes, in my view it is part of the game we accept in order to keep the game moving.

Then along came VAR.

now we are told that these figures that we accept as arbiters of in game disagreements, are not good enough, and require remote public correcting by their own colleagues, thus undermining the referees position.

VAR is a completely unwelcome development based on trying to perfect the unperfectable, and has only resulted in the public degrading of the referee’s ability, fuelling the idea that the referees are all “at it”.

Yes , referees make mistakes, yes, referees can make Big mistakes, but that is part of the contract we accept when we introduced refs into the game.

Sweden just dumped VAR, I vote Scotland do the same, this constant drilling down into every debatable incident, infuriates fans, undermines referees and slows the game down.

the only technology I would allow is goal line tech, to show if the ball crossed the line for a goal.

In case you are not convinced, imagine the next edinburgh or glasgow derby with either: no ref, human only ref or the current situation. Which would you prefer?

I would go for imperfect human ref, with resulting flowing game, mistakes and all.