If you act like a child then you should be treated like a child. It's certainly time the FA took a stand against petulant behaviour.
'Portsmouth and England goalkeeper David James has voiced his opinion on the need for professional footballers to set an example to youngsters. Good!'
Referees have a job that is, to say the least, unenviable. They have got to have extremely thick skins, eyes in the back of their heads and an unfaltering love/passion for the game.
Now it’s been brought to media attention and scrutinised recently thanks to the misdemeanours of Ashley Cole and Javier Mascherano. But this is the world today. This is the media today. It will be highlighted for a week or so and every pundit in the land will offer their opinion. Opinion is what its all about after all isn’t it? Or is it interpretation? They kind of fall into the same category.
Interpretation in turn builds the basis of opinion. What makes it even more frustrating for the referees is that whatever their interpretation of an isolated event is, there are the studio panels and newspaper columnists having theirs. A split second is the time the ref has to make a decision while the rest of us can watch replays and make our minds up 24 hours later, having digested everything comfortably.
Respect for referees is currently the major talking point. Portsmouth and England goalkeeper David James has voiced his opinion on the need for professional footballers to set an example to youngsters. Good!
As with everything in life, something has to happen first for us to take any action. Cole and Mascherano will be wishing they had the gift of hindsight. Both have made utter fools of themselves and I’m sure it has been mirrored in the playground and public parks. Cole made a mockery of the referee.
It was childish and arrogant and completely undermined the man who controls the ebb and flow of the game. Mascherano simply showed us what a stupid loose cannon he can be, and both deserve hefty punishments. The strange thing is that none of these events are new. These incidents have been going on for years. The FA have been musing and muttering over protracted changes like forever.
The fact that footballers are now like pop stars means that it hits the front as well as the back pages, and unfortunately some of these players are acting like they are pop stars, movie stars, whatever. It’s a changed world in football.
It has also changed the job of referees. No longer can they simply concentrate on getting their footballing decisions right but they have to deal with a bunch of arrogant, rich and big-headed prima donnas. Yes, there were always a few, but now it’s almost half of the 22 players on the pitch. It must be like pre-school for the refs.
Many people can be blamed. There are managers who wind their players up so much before a match that they are running on to that pitch looking like crazed maniacs. A sin bin could work but may make the game even more of a stop-start affair. However, if handled properly by the referee and his assistants I really believe it could add an extra edge and dimension to the game.
If teams are punished when a foolish player is binned for 10 minutes then the reaction to losing points and games (and bonuses) I’m quite sure, would dramatically morph certain players into little angels. Of course different players react in different ways. Some lose the plot and go for the ref; others go for opposing players.
Now the latter group are punished for cynical fouls on the opposition yet the cunning players, slyly pestering and badgering the ref throughout the game, usually go unpunished. This is undermining the ref and a slick way of influencing him into decisions.
Dissent is what we’re really talking about here and it is never punished properly. Ten thousand and thirty thousand quid fines mean absolutely nothing to the average Premier League player. Fines should be dealt with in relation to the wages that they earn.
As always, money talks and if you hit them where it hurts I’m sure this stupid back-chatting would disappear fairly quickly. A certain number of sin bins and the appropriate fine is issued.
Not only would these players start to find their bank balance dropping but their availability for first team games diminishing, points being dropped, fans on their backs and managers eventually shipping them out of the club. Is this what it will take?
How would you deal with dissent and lack of respect