Andrei Arshavin (photo by wonker CC BY 2.0)
This weekend Arsenal played Portsmouth and won the game, in the end quite comfortably, 3-0. I am going to take a look at one situation from the game and discuss why it had to be done this way.
After about 40 minutes of the first half Andrei Arshavin was apparently fouled by Portsmouth player Sean Davis just on the edge of the 6 yard box. I am now coming to what I want to discuss; Andrei Arshavin very quickly got on his feet and signaled he wanted the corner and not a penalty. The referee Lee Mason did not listen and still awarded the penalty after it initially being signaled by his assistant. The replays suggest that it should not have been a penalty, and that the referees made the wrong decision. Nicklas Bendtner scored on the penalty and basically ended the game.
Why didn’t the referee listen to Arshavin and award Arsenal the corner instead of the penalty?
Referees can’t listen to players when making their decision. They can, however, be patient and see how the player react after a challenge. Most of the time a player’s body language will indicate if he was fouled or if the tackle was perfectly clean. But, I hear you, why can’t the referee just listen to Arshavin and get the decision correct? Arshavin seems like a perfectly honest player and in the perfect world Lee Mason would have reversed his decision after talking with Arshavin. However, the world is not perfect, and people/players will always try to exploit the system. You see it all the time, with players diving and trying to influence the referee to give a free kick or get players sent off etc.
This is why referees can’t listen to players. You can’t listen to one player and not another player, that’s not going to end well. And as players go, you never know the players relationship. In this situation it sounds a bit crazy, but what if the players were good friends and one of them had something to gain from the situation and used his friendship to manipulate the system? The referee’s integrity is vital to the game of football and players shouldn’t be able to influence him in any way. The number of situations where the referee will gain and get the correct decision by listening to players is far less than the number of situations where the referee will be talked into the wrong decision.
All credit to Arshavin for signaling that he didn’t think he deserved a penalty, but when the decision is already made, no matter how wrong it is, the referee must not be influenced by players reaction. The stakes in professional football is so high and the only way to keep the referee’s integrity intact is to explicitly ignore all attempts on influencing them.
It’s not to say that the referee should never change his decision, but the way it should work is by consulting one of the other referees, someone with a better view and helpful information. In this particular case it would be hard to find someone who could help Lee Mason, as the assistant was the one giving the decision as the referee didn’t have a clear view of the incident.
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