For me, Webb seems to be all authority and not enough brain for the job. Just attending mic’d up and going over different incidents, and then specifically leaving out the audio for one of those incidents is bizarre given the weeks they’ve had. Here’s the exact communication between the referees for this incident, and here’s me interpreting the situation and what the referees might have been thinking, that’s great for transparency.
What i fail to understand is this focus on consequence rather than cause. For me, the entire focus should be on how the players are lunging into a tackle, that has much more to do with damage potential rather than coincidences afterwards. Like the Nketiah lunge at the Tottenham goalkeeper, he’s running towards the goalkeeper with plenty of pace and just throws himself in, he’s inches away from planting his studs high up his foot and he’s also just inches away from locking the goalkeepers foot between his body and the pitch, there’s so much potential for nasty long term injuries yet he escapes with a yellow. Then we have the Gusto challenge, where the outcome is much worse than the way he actually goes in, it’s more of a freak incident than anything else, instant red card. Kovacic needs to run to make up for the distance between him and Ødegaard, lunges in with plenty of pace and plants his studs on his ankle. Situational wise you literally have everything from the way you are lunging in to the end result, yet it’s a yellow card. Saka stamping Bruno’s ankle? You can clearly see he’s following through as well, there’s plenty of intent…For me, the Jones red card makes more sense because of the way he goes in, stamping downwards means that you increase the likelyhood of missing the ball and increasing the likelyhood of nasty injuries, it’s far worse than Gusto’s situation imo.
Again, this extra threshold related to “clear and obvious”, Webbs insistance on not re-refereeing matches and the referee on the pitch being the big boss, is simply leading to more problems than it’s solving. I get that they don’t want to open a can of worms, but what we’re stuck with is a system where identical situations will have different outcomes. Which was annoying enough years ago, but when you factor in VAR as a tool it just makes it more annoying. One week you get a red card and lose a key player for 3 matches, next weekend it’s an almost identical situation where the opposition only gets a yellow card. It should be fairly easy, the referee on the pitch will generally have a better feel of the game, but at the same time everything is happening at a very high speed and expecting the referee to have a proper sense of everything in front of him is naive, especially when it’s generally preventing VAR from getting involved. I easily reckon that if you remove referees and take Webb out of the VAR equation, give the job to a group of people with proper training on the actual rules, the end result would be miles better. I reckon if you sat them down, showed them clips of fouls in relation to goals, red cards etc, penalties for handball, they’d be on agreement on far more situations and create better consistency than what the current lot are doing, who seem to be a bit too much focused on it being a colleague.
Clattenburg and his admissions relating to the Tottenham vs Chelsea match was bad enough, Webb giving the vibes that it’s sort of an understanding that referees are more active than they should, to the point of ignoring the rules, is bizarre. We can’t have one set of rules for a few matches and then introduce something entirely different for the next round.
Shambles.
