The PGMOL and Premier League are not helping themselves, over refereeing standards

It's refereeing crisis time, though there are times when it feels as though the governing bodies and even the referees themselves aren't helping themselves.

So, I am trying something a little different this morning; a two-in-one. This piece is about refereeing standards in the light of what happened at last Saturday’s match between Wolves and Arsenal. But below the paywall line I’ll be going a little deeper on the subject for paying subscribers, including the recent developments regarding David Coote and regarding conspiracy theories. But I’ve written it so that there is something complete for all, so let’s see what happens, eh?

I have to assure you, dear reader, that this is not a conversation that I particularly wanted to get involved in. In recent years, I’ve stopped getting outraged about anything that happens in the Premier League. I barely treat it as football any more, because it’s just so far removed from the game that I grew up watching, preferring to view it as a soap opera instead. Indeed, some of its clubs have started to gain their own spin-off series too, some highly successful. If the Premier League is Cheers, then either Spurs or Manchester United alone could be considered Frasier.

And of all the things on my list of subjects that I would give all my worldly goods never to hear anything about ever again, it would be refereeing standards, refereeing decisions, VAR and conspiracy theories regarding PGMOL and individual referees. But the now-rescinded sending off of Myles Lewis-Skelly for Arsenal at Wolves on Saturday does warrant further comment, and for a number of different reasons. It’s just a shame that we all end up here in the first place.

So, first things first. What was truly exceptional about this particular sending off was just how bad a decision it was. Some context, here. On Saturday afternoon, I was at a match with my girlfriend. Afterwards, we went straight out and had a lovely evening together. At such times, I barely look at social media for the obvious reason that I have better things to do. I was vaguely aware that there’d been a sending off in the Arsenal match about which there’d been some hubbub, and I knew that they’d won 1-0.

The following morning I was writing up the match I was at while half watching the previous evening’s Match of the Day on catch-up in the background, and I almost missed the sending off itself. I was, it’s fair to say, startled by it. “What, that wasn’t the red card, was it?”. Now, I have a vested interest here. As a supporter of Tottenham Hotspur, Arsenal red cards are very much in my best interests, and to a point the more unjust they are the funnier it is. We very much have to take our thrills where we can get them at the moment.

But in this case, my immediate surprise remained. Because that was not a sending off. It was a cynical foul, for sure, and tactical fouling is one of the least appealing things about the modern Premier League. But anybody with a cursory understanding of the laws of the game could clearly see, just from where it took place and the type of foul that it was, that this was not a red card offence. Your mileage, of course, may vary, on how funny you found it all. The laws of the game don’t cover that.

On our podcast on Monday evening, m’learned colleague Sam Whyte offered what I consider to be the most plausible explanation of what happened, that Lewis-Skelly had been mouthing off in the direction of referee Michael Oliver a couple of minutes earlier, and that when Oliver saw the same player commit a flagrant foul shortly after that, his own emotions overtook him and he chose to make an unnecessary example of the player, only… essentially outside of his remit.

This is not the temperament that a referee should have. It is fair to say that the shouting and screaming in their faces is testing—believe it or not, I’ve refereed matches in the past and faced it myself; I even sent a player off for it, once—but until there is some sort of edict from above determining a clampdown on this sort of thing, nothing will happen. Shrieking at the referee or surrounding them could easily be made an automatic yellow card offence. This could happen, but it hasn’t.

But under whatever the current guidelines, if what Sam is saying is correct, then that’s a potential issue. Is this the first time that something like this has happened? Regardless of any talk of a ‘conspiracy’ against Arsenal—and no, I don’t really believe that there is one, though one can only wonder at how ‘popular’ any club is at PGMOL, considering the amount of caterwauling about refereeing decisions that goes on across the board—this would be a broader issue of the temperament of a Premier League referee.

And then there’s the added layer of the institutional level of it all. There have, of course, been previous examples of red cards having been rescinded since VAR was introduced, but nothing quite as egregious as this. So that raises the question… given the number of people who would have been gawping at this when it happened, how did none of them see what literally everybody else who saw it could? What sort of collective brain melt was going on there? Of course, having already set a precedent with this, there’s going to be severe pressure on the Premier League to ‘release the audio now’.

It doesn’t seem unreasonable to ask the question again of what the point of VAR is, if they can’t get decisions like this right. The official verdict was that it was ‘serious foul play’. The fact that the decision has been overturned on appeal demonstrates in itself that it wasn’t. But then, that’s the problem, really, isn’t it? What does and doesn’t constitute a foul is entirely subjective. It’s changed over time, and it changes according to whether we want it to be one or not. Not very often will a group of people watching see any tackle all the same way, unless they’re fans of the same club.

If we have to accept that refereeing by its very nature has to be subjective, then surely the only rational thing that we can do entrust that subjectivity to people that we believe that we can trust to be even-handed. That’s what refereeing is, and one of the biggest problems that the game faces is that fundamental breakdown in trust. But it’s not only on supporters to trust the process more. It’s also on the game’s governing bodies—and ultimately referees—to earn that trust, and decisions such as the one that both Micheal Oliver and the VAR team made at Molineux on Saturday are doing little to assist that.