Match Thread: Island Games - August 13, 2020 - Forge v Cavalry

[maccaliam]

To me, it is never a penalty. I simply think the refereeing team made a mistake. It’s shitty but they are human too. 

[SthMelbRed]

4 hours ago, maccaliam said:

To me, it is never a penalty. I simply think the refereeing team made a mistake. It’s ****** but they are human too. 

I thought it was a questionable call when I saw the clip on Twitter yesterday. I just watched the full highlights on the league website and it's even worse than I thought.

The referee's in a terrible position because he's gotten his line all wrong. If you pause the highlights on 1:09, you'll see that he's basically taken a guess based on some half-hearted appeals from the Calgary players. There were at least 3 players directly blocking his view of the incident due to his poor positioning. All referees have to have a good understanding of the game so they can anticipate the flow of play and, although this guy can point at the unexpected turnover of possession as a bit of an excuse for his terrible position, but that can only account for a little. Realistically, he should be 12-15 yards to his left in order to make that call. 

The assessors would have a field day with that one.

Edited August 15, 2020 by SthMelbRed

[grande]

To be clear: From what I've heard, the 4th official made the call, not the ref.

[SthMelbRed]

1 hour ago, grande said:

To be clear: From what I've heard, the 4th official made the call, not the ref.

The 4th official, from 50+ yards away made the call? This gets better and better. 🙄

[Trois Reds]

13 hours ago, SthMelbRed said:

The 4th official, from 50+ yards away made the call? This gets better and better. 🙄

If the play happens when the referee is unsighted, yes. A player moves in front of him, for instance, just as the play happens. He waves play on, asks the fourth official what he saw, since he could see the play, and makes the call.  

The same thing happens in hockey when the referee at center calls a penalty behind the net while the other ref does nothing from 10 feet away. If you can't see it, you can't call it.

[SthMelbRed]

Let's be honest, there's no way that the 4th official, from a distance of 50 yards, could have processed all of the considerations on that play and determined that there definitely was a handball offense. It's unclear watching it on slow-motion replay with an effective distance of a fifth of that. It's clear that the call, whether it was made by the referee on his own, or on the advice of the 4th official, was a guess. 

[Trois Reds]

As a person who has been a fourth official, I will have to disagree with you. Sometimes it is very clear from 50 yards away.  And, saying this as a central defender when I played, he should have kept his arm to his side when he slid.  Then there would have been no controversy in the first place, as he wouldn't have made himself bigger in the eyes of the Laws.

[SthMelbRed]

Sometimes it may be clear from 50 yards. There's no way that this was one of those times.

There's a reason why you tell your ARs in their pre-match instruction to only flag for fouls within their zone of credibility. If the referee told the players on the pitch that the call came from the 4th official, they'd go ballistic. Likewise the coaches. That's because he has no credibility on that play. From 50 yards, he wouldn't be able to say with certainty the ball had struck the body or the arm in real time. 

If the CSA sent an assessor to that game, he'd be eviscerating the centre for being badly out of position on the key decision of the whole match, and, if it's true that the 4th made the call, he'd be getting it, too.