(S)He's Lost Control

A topic close to all of our hearts... Scottish refereeing.

Saturday’s 1-0 win over Kilmarnock was a game that is unlikely to be popping up in anyone’s list of favourite outings at Pittodrie, a classic this was not.

Kilmarnock’s game plan was evident from the opening minutes - they were more than happy to look to force Aberdeen to go long and then try to dominate the aerial battle within their own third whilst looking to pick up second balls wherever they dropped and the visitors were, generally, pretty successful in this endeavour - winning 51% of their duels throughout the 90 minutes with a 60% win rate in aerial duels.

That success rate in the air was boosted significantly by Corrie Ndaba winning 83% of his aerial duels during the course of the afternoon.

Coupled with this was the willingness to break up play whenever possible with lengthy time taken over restarts and just generally making the game as stop start as was possible.

It’s Killie’s prerogative to play in whichever manner they think will get them a result but Derek McInnes’ men were more than helped in that task thanks to the efforts of a certain man in black - Mr. Nick Walsh.

This was a classic of the SFA refereeing genre. An all-timer of a display from a referee who is fast becoming loathed across the country for showings much like the one we saw on Saturday afternoon.

Saturday was, by no means, a dirty game of football but the manner in which Walsh officiated would make you think otherwise. A stark statistic in terms of the stop start nature of the game is this one - the ball was dead on Saturday for 59 minutes and 40 seconds in totality.

From the moment that Walsh decided to lecture Sivert Heltne Nilsen for an extended period over a nothing challenge early in the game, it was clear that this was going to be the Nick Walsh show all over again. I’m not sure if there’s another top flight referee who seems so certain that the paying public have come to watch him strut his stuff as Walsh is - perhaps Kevin Clancy?

The situation surrounding the phantom penalty was pure slapstick.

In his rush to make the penalty call - Walsh somehow managed to book Heltne Nilsen for protesting the decision and then flashed a yellow and then a red card towards Kristers Tobers. Walsh then realised at some point that he’d mixed up Tobers with Palaversa and had to swiftly rescind that but no-one in the ground really had any idea as to what was going on.

All of this pointed to a referee to keen to get involved and “be seen” rather than walking things through logically. It reminded me of Willie Collum being so eager to send off Andy Considine at Hampden in one of those Cup Semis v Celtic that Collum dropped his red card in the rush to take it out of his pocket and had actually sent the player off prior to making an award of a penalty….

Walsh knows that VAR will look back at the penalty call. If he’s not sure who committed the foul, why not wait for VAR to (a) confirm that the award of the penalty is correct and (b) if it is, get the VAR to confirm who was the player that fouled Donnelly? If his initial instinct was right, he can award a pen and then give Tobers a booking in that order.

That way, he at least looks as though he is retaining a semblance of order and calm over the situation - instead, he looked panicked and completely unsure of himself - players pick up on that and will use it to their advantage later in the game.

The best referees have always been the ones who slip into the background and, generally, go unnoticed throughout a game - stepping in when needed but trying to let the game flow. And yes, as football fans are we often too fickle about seeing a referee let things go when it’s to the detriment of our team? Of course we are, but I think it’s probably a fair assessment to suggest that most fans want a game to be able to breathe and find it’s own sense of rhythm within the confines of the laws of the game.

If Kilmarnock want to come and play in the manner they did yesterday, that’s fine but they shouldn’t be emboldened in the approach by a referee like Walsh biting on everything that happens on the pitch.

Killie were already happy to make the game stop start with their own actions, when the referee gets involved it invariably leads to the dullest of dull encounters that serves no-one, let alone the paying public.

Walsh is not a novice - he’s been refereeing games in the top flight for 10 years now. By now you’d think he’d have learned when a team is attempting to use him and his decision making to slow the game up and to be wise to it. It’s this lack of street-wiseness amongst our referees that is really starting to show and really starting to grate.

My eldest was back at Pittodrie again yesterday and he’s in the fortunate position to have never seen his side lose at home (P20 W19 D1 as of yesterday). He’s a proper little Scottish football fan. When he wakes on a Sunday morning, his first port of call on the Sky+ box is to watch the recording of Sportscene ahead of Match of the Day. When it’s a toss up between an SPFL or EPL game on TV, he invariably picks the SPFL game - in a time where it’s so easy for kids to want to watch the “superstars” of world football, his desire to watch Scottish football is refreshing in the extreme.

Yesterday though, about half-way through the second half he turned to me and said:-

I’m bored of this… this referee is ruining the game, he just won’t let them play… it’s not even like there’s been a bad tackle here.

He’s 7 years old and he often displays a level of understanding of the game that I find unfathomable at his age but that simple statement was one that really got me thinking.

For those of us who’ve lived and breathed Aberdeen FC & Scottish football for the guts of 40 years we perhaps don’t take that step back to look at just what sort of impact these types of game will have on the longer-term viability of the sport in Scotland unless things change.

Let’s be honest, with Celtic’s run in the Champions League this season, they could foreseeably win every domestic gong going for the next decade without breaking too much sweat. It’s going to be hard enough to maintain and grow the level of support in our game within younger age groups with that sort of monopoly on the silverware - it becomes nearly impossible if you are subjecting people to the lack of entertainment on display yesterday.

It’s incumbent on all within our game to try and encourage the next generation of supporters to come through and that filters all the way through to our refereeing community - they are part and parcel of the game and they have the power to referee in a manner that at least tries to encourage games of football to break out from time to time.

Walsh feels like one of the worst-offenders in the league for his inability to let a game flow but, remarkably, when you look at his base numbers, he’s actually one of those who appears more likely to allow a game to flow - a fouls/tackles ratio of 0.65 places him in the top 7 of officials from that perspective and he’d be in the top 4 if you only counted refs with 10+ top flight games to their name this season. That’s remarkable stuff.

It’s a real problem across our game - I subjected myself to St. Mirren v Hibs last weekend and again, this was a poor game of football but it was not helped in the slightest by the officiating of Ross Hardie - there was a moment in the second half where it appeared that he and his assistants were just having a laugh with each other to see what mental decision they could give next - the second yellow card to Hibs’ Alasana Manneh was hilariously bad.

The advent of VAR has been a blight on our game since it’s introduction and, unlike in England where they seem to have found a decent balance between it’s utilisation without over-reliance, our game has just become mired in the whole thing. Our referee pool was never big enough to handle 4 or 5 top flight games running in parallel when it comes to the level of personnel needed in the VAR room (1 x VAR + 1 x AVAR) plus referees and assistants on the ground - that’s meant that we’ve seen a number of “new” officials make the step up to the top flight who are clearly not ready for it whilst experienced individuals take up seats at Clydesdale House.

Throw in the complete lack of investment in proper technology and you have the perfect storm for a shitshow of epic proportions. By the letter of the law, VAR probably got the big decisions at Pittodrie right yesterday but as a spectator in the ground, the experience is awful.

It was AFCCT day at Pittodrie yesterday and the upper RDS was filled to the brim with young families on various Dons Day Out initiatives, etc. We were sitting in and amongst a number of non-regular match goers and they were bewildered as to what was going on the park during the penalty incident and the lengthy check on Okkels’ goal. Okkels’ was clearly offside from the moment you look at it - how it took as long as it did to determine on screen is crazy. This doesn’t encourage any casual observer to think about attending games more frequently.

It’s not just at Pittodrie that this is felt - the decision to chop off Maeda’s late goal at Easter Road yesterday is wild. Far be it for me to defend Celtic but there’s no definitive angle (back to the lack of investment in proper technology to support the implementation of VAR) from which you can 100% say that all of the ball was over the line - it’s pure guesswork from all involved and the on-field decision should have stood.

There were shades of our goal at Livi last season that was ruled out through absolute guess work on the VAR side of things after Hawkeye collapsed in on itself.

Both of St. Mirren’s goals yesterday were threatened with being chopped off at Ibrox for little to no reason with those decisions taking an eternity to be relayed back to the stadium - although in that instance the impending seethe made it a more enjoyable spectacle.

So where do we go from here?

Who knows. The standard of officiating in Scotland feels like it’s at an all time low and there needs to be a drastic reset.

We aren’t blessed with the finest technical players in the world, our uniqueness is in the frantic, fast-paced nature of our game and it feels right now that our refereeing community is throttling this back.

Refs need to become more streetwise and aware of what teams are doing and they need to start pushing back on this - allow more things to go, you don’t have to blow for every single infringement if the ball remains in play and with the side who had it. Teams will soon adapt their behaviours if they see a ref is going to let the advantage rule take over.

VAR needs to be put into the bin.

Yes, this isn’t a controversial statement and, yes, there’s an argument that it still gets the majority of calls right.

Would Aberdeen have conceded a penalty yesterday without it? Probably.

Did it get the majority of decisions referred to it yesterday across Scotland correct? Yes.

Until it is implemented with a level of technology that allows ALL decisions to be correct, for the process to be sped up and for communication in ground to be improved, it has to go - it’s detrimental to our game in so many ways and it’s going to cost us developing the next generation of supporters in our grounds. The sooner our clubs and governing bodies wrap their heads around this, the better.