These days VAR and other useful props guide Premier referees into making more informed decisions, but in League One, the only guide they seem to need these days is a dog! Now, I am not trying to suggest that we are the only club to have suffered at this level at the hands of poor officiating but let’s face it, we have had more than our fair share of it of late.
Manager Paul Lambert threw his dummy out when Toto Nsiala was sent off at Lincoln, and the home side was awarded a rather dubious penalty, which was quickly converted. I had little sympathy at the time, to be honest, but on reflection, there may have been some validity in the argument that it was a harsh sending off, and the kind of penalty that mainly home sides get.
On Tuesday night, my attitude changed completely, because referee Peter Wright got two very big decisions so terribly wrong, and we ended up losing a game against one of our closest rivals, that we may well have gone on to win. Former Premier League referee Mark Halsey, who was officiating for twelve years in the top flight of English football is convinced that they were schoolboy errors from the man in the middle from Merseyside. “For me, he was guessing on that one and got it wrong. You never guess as a referee. If you miss an incident – or you’re not sure then you don’t give it – especially when it comes to game-changing events like penalties and red cards. Unfortunately, the standard of officiating is not the best across all divisions at the moment. It’s dropping alarmingly.”
In the case of Andre Dozzell, and the club’s attempt to get that red-card overturned, it was quite predictably rejected by the F.A. According to Halsey, League One has limited camera coverage and it is, therefore, difficult to prove your argument. “We saw Everton argue recently that the punishment didn’t fit the crime following Lucas Digne’s red card, and he subsequently got his ban reduced to one game. I wonder if Ipswich could’ve asked for something similar?”
Mike Bacon, writing in the East Anglian Daily Times, nailed it when he said, that our main problem is the league we are in. If ever Ipswich Town’s players needed a reason to want to hurry up and get out of League One, then we witnessed it at Sunderland. In all walks of life, you get what you pay for. And when it comes to ref’s fees, I’ll wager Premier League refs get paid more than League One refs, who get paid more than Thurlow Nunn League refs… And so on.
He makes some good points. One of them was that footballers’ technical ability decreases the further you go down the football pyramid and so too does the standard of refereeing. Few would dispute this but isn’t it about time we got the odd penalty ourselves – or saw one of our opponents suffer the indignity of losing a man?
Tomorrow is a nice distraction, and I hope that unlike Mr Bacon, we take full advantage of it and progress to the next round. It will not be easy but if ever we had something to prove it is probably at Portman Road on a Saturday afternoon, where we can begin to set aside the injustices of the modern game, and at a level, we do not want to become accustomed to.
