The EFL must address the standard of refereeing before trust erodes completely

Big decisions will always create debate, but surely fans should be able to expect referees to get the very basics right?

If, at any given point during that four-year League One Sunderland nightmare, someone had asked me what I was most looking forward to about promotion, I’d have said getting away from the horrendously incompetent referees. I can’t actually believe I was so stupid.

I have to start this by accepting that referees are very easy targets for football fans. Our team loses a game and we look for scapegoats for our anger. I understand that.

This is also not some kind of rant in which I claim referees are biased or corrupt or anything of that nature. The reality is, the referee and his assistants are probably the only truly neutral people within the ground on any given matchday up and down the country.

That, though, says nothing of their competency, and there can be little doubt anymore that the entire EFL – not just the lower reaches of it – has a serious problem with refereeing competency right now. 

I am not even talking about the big calls that referees get wrong either. Let’s face it, they always have made mistakes like that and they always will. If the introduction of VAR has proven anything at all, it is that referees will even manage to get it wrong with help from multiple camera angles and super slow-motion replays. It’s something we just have to accept.

It’s more the general level of incompetence that I’m talking about. This season at Sunderland alone we have seen referee not even see a challenge that resulted in a broken foot, never mind punish it. That said, the same referee did see a player with his hand around another’s throat and didn’t even talk to the culprit, so there is no real reason to assume he’d have acted even if he did see the foot-breaker.

Last week we saw a referee disallow a Sunderland goal to give them the ‘advantage’ of a free kick instead. Just a few days before, the ball was in play for just 44 minutes of the 90 against Preston.

It’s easy to blame Preston for that one, but it’s not their job to stop it. It’s the referee’s.

"You can call it professionalism, you can call it clever, you can call it whatever you want,” Tony Mowbray said after the match. “I think if I was an opposing manager coming to the Stadium of Light with 40-odd thousand in, I'd want to keep them quiet and slow everything down, not make the game fast so everything is a tackle and it's end-to-end. You'd want to slow it down, make it boring, keep the fans quiet.”

"I feel the referee has a duty, because people pay their hard-earned money to come and watch the game. They've literally only watched 44 minutes of football in a 90-minute match."

In those League One days it felt like it was a Sunderland-specific problem. Sunderland were the big dogs in the yard and teams came deliberately looking to disrupt. I don’t think anyone really expected it to continue as a newly promoted Championship club playing in a division that, you’d hope, boasted the pick of the available Football League officials.

It was something that Norwich were frustrated by this week too. Again the opposition was Preston and, again, the home manager was left apoplectic by the inability of the referee to understand that he is being conned.

"They slowed it down at every opportunity,” Smith said. “I don't blame them, I blame the officials for not dealing with that. The officiating for delaying was really poor. I have been to see the officials. Something has to be done about it. He could have put 20 minutes up at the end. We come to see a game. On the pitch, not off it."

However, why would Preston change anything? What they are doing is working. Football coaching is about eking out every possible advantage for yourself, and that is what they do. It is the referee who are the ones not doing their job of ensuring a fair contest.

It feels inconceivable to me that referees watch what we do and cannot see what is going on, and yet every piece of evidence suggests they are just not bright enough to see it. Half the time I am tempted to hang around the exit to the stadium after the match to see if I can make a killing by selling magic beans to EFL referees. And yet these are the people we are told we should be respecting and trusting.

"Goodness me,” Tony Mowbray said after the Blackpool game this season. I don't want to lambast the referee, but there was some strange stuff going on out there, wasn't there? I do think the standard of refereeing in this league needs improving.”

The refereeing didn’t cost Sunderland at Swansea last week, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be talking about it.

There was one particular flashpoint in injury time when Jack Clarke was booked for diving. I don’t think he was fouled, but I don’t think he dived either. The referee thought he was trying to con him, though.

Bizarre, then, that just minutes earlier he didn’t think the same of the Swansea goalkeeper who convinced him that he was suffering from cramp. The goalkeeper.

Let’s also not forget about the incident in the first half when Aji Alese was fouled to such an extent that the Swansea defender literally tore his shirt off his chest. Not only did the referee not award a free kick, but he even force Alese to leave the pitch to get a new one and stand on the touchline waiting for permission to return while Swansea attacked down his side of the pitch. It really does take a special level of refereeing incompetence to engineer a clear advantage for a team as a direct result of ripping the shirt from an opponent’s back. And yet, here we are.

We fans have always complained about referees getting the big decisions wrong. We always will too, and we maybe have to accept that we can’t always trust out objectivity on them. We should be able to trust that referees can get the very basics correct though. I don’t want to speak for anyone else, but my own personal trust in that has been all but entirely eroded at this point. 

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