by Stuart Crowther

Date: 26th June 2002

Double the trouble - proposal is referee hell! UEFA boss seeks to put two referees on the pitch! IT IS SURELY BAD ENOUGH FINDING ONE REFEREE of sufficient quality to handle games in the SPL, but if UEFA Chief Executive Gerhard Aigner gets his way, then we will be seeing double soon with one referee in each half of the field.  This is the latest daft idea to come from a World Cup that has seen the very best and very worse both in terms of the quality of the football and the quality of refereeing! That something needs to be done is clear, the albeit passionate and sometimes simply moaning Scottish football fan will agree to that!  It's easy of course to blame the referee for all that ails your own football favourites, and that during the last 12 months is arguably of particular truth down at Easter Road.  But the simple truth is that a referee can make or break the entertainment value in any game of football, his skills are at their best when he is not even noticed in a game, but all too often he is not only being noticed but increasingly seeing his performance as the main talking point of the game.  We used to talk about the amazing skills of Zidane, this World Cup it has been more about the amazing blunders of the men in black - and often this has led to sinister accusation.  The conspiracy theorists have had a great World Cup! The use of modern technological advances have been embraced by just about every major sport in the world.  Alas for some reason those who run football are reluctant to move from their 'human resources' stance, which is why Gerhard would rather see another pair of faulty human eyes on the pitch than rely on the 20-odd cameras that seem to capture our game from every angle (how long before we have cameras embedded in a players' shin-pads, one wonders!)  "Before we start to talk about cameras, slow-motion replays or stopping the game we should first exploit human resources," Aigner told the world press yesterday, adding:  "We have unfortunately never had a serious test with two referees. This test should be made.  It must provide an advantage for the simple reason that the referee will be less tired.  He can be closer to the action and has a better chance of judging a situation such as offside, and how can a referee judge whether a player is acting if he is not close enough to the action?" Two of them?  A scary prospect! (sns) The average punter will wonder though what happens when the two officials disagree.  That is just one of the factors in his grand plan that Aigner does not appear to have thought through, but the overwhelming point is that in a time when the quality of refereeing around the world is being brought to question, any idea that advocates simply creating more referees - and therefore doubling the problem - is just plain daft.  Had UEFA and FIFA the courage to introduce video evidence into the World Cup finals, then Spain would most certainly have been running out against Germany in yesterday's semi-final.  The Spanish 'golden goal' that never was has to be the most dramatically wrong decision of this World Cup, the entire world watched with dropped jaw as they could see an injustice being perpetrated, an injustice that could have been put right on the spot by a fourth official (who already exists) and a television monitor. There are some great match officials throughout the world, and at least Aigner had one excellent point to make about that, insisting that what world football needs to do is break away from insisting that there should be a limit on the number of referees from each country officiating on world football.  If a referee is shown to be good enough, the fact that there are five better match officials from his own country should not be stopping him from being at the big show, as Aigner pointed out when he said: "It doesn't make any difference to the Turkish national team, for example, to have two Italian referees in a row, as long as they are different persons.  If they are the best they should get the chance to be at the major competitions, where the best teams are." Many Scottish fans of course would welcome the importation of referees from nations that have a surfeit of quality officials.  That would be more true if the daft idea of doubling referees were brought into play!