There are many, many problems with reffing in the Prem, it’s not just one thing. But this one is a great example of the incompetence. That was just so, so, bad and I’m an Arsenal supporter.

For us all to be in better shape, we absolutely must call out the bullshit as unacceptable no matter the club on the receiving end.

lol, januzaj was a force for a minute. Then, poof! He was gone.

Out here doing God’s work. Thanks, OP! It would be really interesting to know how this role he’s excelling at compares with someone like Xhaka prior to last year when he morphed into Goalzilla. I wonder if Arteta has initially prioritized this subtler, off the ball stuff with him on a longer term development track and will start asking him to do more offensive stuff when he settles in a bit more (maybe in a year or two as happened with Xhaka as well).

I think one of the huge challenges here is that culturally, across all sports, we’re moving away from a model of broad trust in officials to be the “fallible but mostly deferred to” arbiters of the rules towards a model of letter of the law perfection that has huge consequences monetarily and emotionally for teams and fans.

In the old model, particularly in football, refs had to use a lot of discretion in how to manage the game (giving warnings and not yellow carding too early, etc.). This is their mindset and how they’ve been trained whether intentionally or just by cultural forces.

In the new model, the patience for subjectivity without reasonable explanation is virtually nil. So in order to evolve, they have to both learn how to communicate their reasoning more effectively and they need more tools for game management. For example, ways to give some actual consequences rather than just a stern talking to.

Of course there will still be quibbles (was that only an orange, should it have been a red, why wasn’t player Y given an orange when player X was for something similar). But overall, it improves the ability of the refs to say, “we handed out a consequence, here was our reasoning. Partisans may not always agree with the decision, feel free to voice that and we’ll continue trying to improve”.

But continuing to do nothing and hide behind the shield of “you can’t criticize referees” will absolutely not work. I’m all for this kind of experimentation. We as fans will also need to learn how to value incremental progress rather than trashing everything the moment it doesn’t work perfectly.