As we approach another week of European football, with the Champions and Europa League set to hit our TV screens between Tuesday and Thursday night, some questions have to be asked of UEFA’s introduction of a 5th and 6th referee in European football and their completely cack-handed approach to implementing this system – so it works for the good of the game.
The first and obvious question is are these extra officials actually contributing anything to actually achieving the correct decisions being made? The simple answer is no! Despite the introduction of more assistants, Captain Hook could count on his available fingers, the number of times these waxwork dummies have actually been seen to assist the boss in helping to achieve their chief objective to ‘ensure that the Laws of the Game are upheld, informing the referee of incidents of any kind that he may otherwise have missed, particularly in key areas of the field like the penalty area and its surroundings’ – since their introduction to the Europa League group stages in the 2009/10 season.
The second is why do they not have flags? Mind boggling really, given the bright shiny flag is such a tried and tested method of attracting attention. Instead, the hapless incumbents of these positions are given, what appears to be a toned down version of an old fashioned police truncheon. No wonder, they’re not making any decisions! I for one would be just plain embarrassed to wave such an implement in a stadium full of fans, who have never been known for their fondness towards officials. This said, they do have wireless communication through to the referee in the middle. So perhaps the lot of them just suffer from stage fright or are mute? Alternatively UEFA might just be entrusting a little crowd control on them as something to do with their underused batons?
Last, but by no means least, why this season have they started to stand on the opposite side of the goal that they originally stood on? Apparently, the official line from UEFA is because referees like to run the diagonal. Do they really? How nice for them; when their job is to run anywhere on the pitch necessary to get a good viewpoint of the game – they are being paid to officiate. In order to ‘ensure that the Laws of the game are upheld’. Even more baffling, when you consider the promotional video UEFA released, which shows them standing in their original position.
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