It is a long time since I looked at a referee’s rule book but we am sure the first rule us “the referee’s decision is final”. Clearly this is a rule that lends itself to wisdom, corruption, conscious and unconscious bias. I feel that in these days of high finance, High scrutiny, high speed, high jinks, professional diving, pressurising there is little room for it. Call it unfortunate, unacceptable or call it progress but that is where we are. I agree with the idea of the spirit of the rules, which is essentially how they are decided but I think the only way we can deal with this is carefully crafting them with this criteria in mind. We want good play to be rewarded with goals, we want the dark arts to be punished fairly. The use of technology is the way forward. One of my personal ideas is yellow carding all simulation whether it was a foul or not but at the same time giving pens for a foul even if the attacker doesn’t go to ground. VAR should be used for this, will we then have a Salad toss in the box when the cheating dipper is already on a yellow? Even if he isn’t you can bet he would accumulate enough of them over a season for a ban.
