Rate the ref.

Many years ago now, on Dubya's instigation, I had a spell of rating the ref, on the rate the ref site (I assume it no longer exists). I had to stop, because it got demoralising. Of course officiating is now the responsibility of a team of officials, the laws of the game have been changed to help accommodate them, and the whole thing is a complete mess.

So what do you think about the state of officiating? What is good, what is bad, what are the improvements that can be made?

For me there are structural problems outside specific decision making (which remains poor). I always said that VAR should be what it says on the tin. An official watching the video feed, alerting the referee to things obvious from the video feeds, that were not obvious from the onfield views.

Things that are not okay, with the current status of officiating:

1. The laws of the game are wrong, causing officials to make decisions contrary to the spirit of the game - examples would be the handball catastrofuck, offside when players clearly interfering with the actions of the defence are deemed to be not offside.
2. Unnecessary and inappropriate phases of play are being played because obvious decisions are not being made - players play on, wasting time from the game, risking injury, incorrect outcomes result (an offside attacking player is allowed to play on and ultimately wins a corner).
3. Most of the game is being under-refereed, and then key events are re-refereed - but those key events are often very much a consequence of the under-refereeing, which rarely gets corrected.
4. Refereeing only occurs if there is a goal related incident, or players fall down. This causes players to fall down, to make refereeing happen.
5. Timekeeping is hideously haphazard and demonstrably wrong in most cases.

I'm not touching the state of the laws of the game, and the application of judgement over individual incidents.

We now have teams of officials, have modified the laws to assist referees, and given them technology to assist them, yet for me none of it is producing outcomes that are good enough, and it is ruining the game.

Defenders absolutely should be allowed to make contact...to get touch tight, to put their body in a position that is in the attackers way. That's good defending. That an attacker can just fall over in the face of good defending, and get a free kick, is a failure of the laws and officiating.

That a player can now get penalised for standing still, or running, or kicking, is surely a fundamental problem in a game that relies on all of those?

If a player is sheilding the ball from an opponent without attempting to play it, that should be obstruction, and the award of an indirect free kick.

The fundamental problem at the heart of all this is that the rule makers appear to not actually like football. They want to turn it into ballet.

I am not talking about the actual laws here, because they are a bag of spanners.

For me football should be about playing, or attempting to play, the ball. If you are doing that, as long as you are not recklessly endangering an opponent, or using your hands, you should be okay to go about your business. If you are not doing that, and impacting negatively on an opponent trying to do that, then you should be judged to be committing a punishable offence.

Shielding the ball without attempting to play it fails into that category, for me. Which is entirely different to playing the ball and then shielding it, or rolling a defender to then turn and play the ball. Those would require the judgement/opinion of the referee. So we are probably fucked either way.

I don't mind a ref (or linesmen) on the field, in real time, making mistakes. We've all been there...you shout at them, and then get on with it.

I totally resent them being selective when they referee, stopping the game for minutes on end, and then getting the decisions wrong anyway.