English Premier League Refs Get Another Wrongful Bashing

Just one weekend of the Premier League season has been played, but it's already business as usual when it comes to refereeing.

Over recent years, several groups involved in the sport seem to have decided they know better than the officials. Fans, players, managers, and pundits all seem to take delight in criticising refs based on a poor understanding of the rules of the game and not much else.

The most high-profile incident this weekend was Joe Cole's sending off against Liverpool. No one would argue the challenge on Laurent Koscienly was a good tackle. Cole was late, went in with his studs up and arguably used two feet.
He didn't make a massive amount of contact with Koscienly, but then he doesn't need to. The rules deal with the challenge itself, not its end result.

The laws of the game state, "Any player who lunges at an opponent in challenging for the ball from the front, from the side or from behind using one or both legs, with excessive force and endangering the safety of an opponent is guilty of serious foul play."

It's hard to view Cole's challenge as anything other than a lunge, so it seems pretty clear Martin Atkinson made the right decision. It's not even as if it had much of an impact on the latest Premier League odds—Liverpool were still the better side.

So why all the fuss then? Sadly it seems many fans, players, managers, and pundits want the game to be refereed according to the laws as they imagine them to be, not as they actually are.

It's a ref's job to know the rules, and they will spend a huge amount of time studying them. You can bet on football games being a lot more disorganised if they didn't. Officials aren't perfect, but when it comes to an issue of interpretation it's pretty obvious who you should trust.

It would be fun to watch players, pundits, and fans have a go at running a game and then have refs pick apart their performances afterwards. It would be enlightening to say the least.