SebastianBlue
President, International Julian Alvarez Fan Club
- Joined
- 25 Jul 2009
- Messages
- 57,736
The issue here is that this sort of intentional officiating to advantage a team is most effective *when* the team to be disadvantaged are playing poorly.Ref wasn’t great but I’m getting sick of just blaming them we were absolutely a disgrace today,and Toney with his 2nd goal reminded me of the spurs game last season get it back to 2-2 then pile everyone forward looking a winner and get caught out,take the fucking point first and foremost at least come away with something ffs..
That’s the aspect to this sort of biased match influence that people miss. If the disadvantaged team is playing well, it is usually not enough.
But today is a perfect example of when officials trying to achieve a certain outcome works well.
Our players were incredibly frustrated throughout and were fairly certain Brentford were going to be allowed to manhandle players, waste time, and generally receive favouritism whenever it could be given, which has an overall impact on play. Add VAR ignoring clear and obvious errors and this helps the officials to achieve a certain outcome.
The psychological effect alone when a team is collectively performing poorly is often enough to achieve the desired outcome.
And saying “we were poor, we can’t blame the ‘bad’ officiating” will just embolden them to do more. It’s just giving up in the face of it and incentivising more of it.
It’s unfortunately similar to the abusee’s mindset: “they’re just like that, just have to make the best of it, and work harder to make them treat us better”. That just leads to continued abuse until some sort of breaking point.