Taylor is spot on.
That incident with his family being abused and attacked after the Europa League Final was an utter disgrace, and all started by Mourinho who only got a four match ban for it (the **** should have got half a season).
Taylor simply didn’t fall for all of Roma’s constant diving, pretending to be injured and timewasting and punished Mourinho for running on the pitch to confront him while play was taking place. Mourinho was after Taylor all game, trying to intimidate him but Taylor ref’d it spot on.
Mourinho then waited for him in the car park which emboldened the Roma support to do the same to Taylor and his family at the airport (a table was thrown at them, for fuck’s sake). The Roma fans ignored all of Mourinho and his players’ cheating in that game and ran with their blind faith that Mourinho couldn’t be at fault or wrong and they acted in the same way as their **** of a manager.
In football, we get the standard of officials we deserve!
In grassroots junior football parents abuse and threaten young referees from the sideline. In open age amateur football referees can face anything from being verbally threatened to physical violence or get back to the car park after a game to find their vehicle has been damaged. All the way up to elite professional football, the level of constant cheating by players and coaches is off the scale (far more than any other sport and I’m fucking sick to death of it!) and the verbal abuse they get aimed at them by players shows this sport in a very poor light.
It all emboldens spectators to abuse officials to a far too extreme level, and fans even go as far as to send death threats to referees and/or their families online.
All of this means that the amount of referees the sport entices and retains is smaller than it could be which means the talent pool of officials is not good enough for a sport of this magnitude… because, who the fuck wants to put up with this shit from this sport?
Too many fans never take any of this into consideration. They, like the Roma fans, just run with their entrenched biases around their own clubs and don’t look at the wider picture. They think it’s all corruption against their club, which is pure delusion when you read and hear the views of fans of all clubs who all think referees are corrupt against their club. Every…single…set of fans think this, and they can’t all be right!
Fans don’t help themselves in other ways either. Considering many fans can watch upwards of a dozen games of this sport a week, the amount of fans who don’t know the LotG is staggering. The amount of bollocks you read on social media and hear in conversations makes me wonder at times if football is just a sport for simpletons.
Agüero scored once after Ederson pinged a ball to him from a goal kick when he was stood in an offside position. A lad near me said ‘don’t know why they did that, it won’t count, he was offside’. I told him ‘you can’t be offside from a goal kick’ and he told me to shut up and stop being ridiculous.
This season on this site I’ve seen multiple posters asking why we aren’t seeing the VAR draw the lines for offsides anymore, when we’ve had the semiautomated offside AI system in the PL since April. It should have been remembered by our fanbase more than any other because it was City v Palace in April which was the first ever game in this country to have the semiautomated offside AI system in place.
Fans are also deluded with their expectations of officials. Even in sports where the standard of officials is excellent, they still make mistakes. Yet in football, where the standard of officials is poor, many fans - who have made their judgements on referee decisions after they’ve seen multiple replays from different speeds at different angles over a number of days - moan that the officials didn’t get a decision right with no understanding that the officials only saw the incident once, at one speed, from one angle, and maybe even missed it as they might have been looking at something else on the pitch at the time (not talking about VAR decisions with that point, that’s a different topic).
Taylor is actually one of the better referees, but overall the standard of officials in football is very poor. But it’s not their fault, it’s not PIGMOL’s fault, it’s the fault of the players and spectators of this sport from grassroots level all the way up to to the most elite level.
We need to change the culture around referees in this sport at all levels, then we will get a better standard of referees and the sport can move up in quality.
