Mike Jones Was so Wrong on Sergio Aguero, but Referees Need Clear Direction

In Britain—and, for all I know, lots of other countries—there is an odd attitude to cheating. Odd and very unfriendly to the creative player.

If, for example, an attacker is going through on goal, feels a slight tug on his shirt or nudge in the back and goes down to earn a foul and a card against the offender, he is called a diver and a cheat.

If, on the other hand, he feels the tug or nudge, decides to stay on his feet and, having lost momentum, now snatches at the chance, missing it, nothing much is said, except that some television expert might opine that the defender "did just enough to put him off."

And yet who, in each frequently enacted hypothesis, is the cheat? In the first, I’d argue that both players have cynically tried to deceive or at least influence the referee. In the second, it would clearly be the defender alone. Yet, when the pillory is brought out, it is for an attacker.

Given we all say we follow football for its creativity and excitement, I’ve often wondered why this is the case. Perhaps there is a bit of the killjoy in our psyche. Perhaps this is why FIFA were so wise to issue an instruction, about a quarter of a century ago, that marginal offside decisions should always be awarded to the attacker.

It was such a good move that, over the years, the change in assistant referees' behaviour led to at least a marginal increase in the number of goals. The law might have been working against human nature, but it was improving the game as most of us would want to enjoy it.

I have long wanted to see a similar kind of engineering applied to fouls and misconduct. Here, still, the general bias appears to be against attackers. There have been plenty of campaigns against diving and the cumulative effect could be detected in the most blatantly unfair decision of the Premier League weekend: Mike Jones' yellow carding of Sergio Aguero at Southampton.

"

Mike Jones should have next weekend off for some Christmas shopping. Terrible decision to book Aguero. Clear pen. No dive. #mcfc

— Henry Winter (@henrywinter) November 30, 2014"

It was bad enough that the Manchester City striker was denied a penalty, for he fell only when Jose Fonte’s scything tackle made it inevitable, but at the same time he extended his arms and referees seem to take that as a sign of possible diving.

How silly. Naturally, Jones, television having spotlighted the blatancy of his error, took a lot of punishment from the court of public opinion. But who had made him think that it was as important to look for diving as for fouls? The very same public. We get the referees we deserve.

What I would like to happen is for the referees’ organisation—Professional Game Match Officials Limited, PGMOL for short (though it takes almost as long to say)—to issue one new instruction and make it paramount. Officials should, of course, watch out for and sanction obvious diving, but they should look at cheating as a whole.

Shaun Botterill/Getty Images

In other words, the sneaky tug or nudge should be punished, even if the attacker merely loses momentum and wastes his opportunity. At present, it is an unwritten law that you have to fall in order to earn at least a foul to deter or prevent your opponent from persisting, which I think turns referees into contributors to the diving impulse.

Therefore, simply heaping opprobrium on Mike Jones—"often considered as the weakest member of the select group of referees,” according to Graham Poll in the Daily Mail—is not the answer.

There will always be mistakes by referees—more than there should be, due to FIFA’s foolish stance against televisual assistance—but this kind of error was more a reflection of the clutter in their heads than anything else.

Ears cocked for the anti-diving sirens, they have tried to please the audience rather than help the game.