Delph's dismissal

[old man villa fan]

Its not a red card for me.

I don't like the slow creep towards a no contact sport. Its late and clumsy, but its never a sending off.

I have seen these given as red and, then again, given as yellow.  No consistency.

I agree with your comment on slow creep to no contact sports.  We are seeing an out of proportion increase in cards compared with fouls.  Look at yesterday, four fouls resulting in a yellow and a straight red.

Football has become a very technical and high speed game with TV dissecting every incident.  However, expecting players to get timing spot on every time is too much.  What they should be trying to separate and punish accordingly is the malicious foul and the various forms of cheating.  I believe that cheating caught on camera should be punished with a retrospective yellow, whether the ref has seen the incident or not.

[old man villa fan]

Just watched MOTD, so first time to see it back, and can see why it was a red although the one by Clint Hill for QPR just before was equally as bad and only got a yellow. That inconsistency is why these things will always be disputed.

The fact that other refs got certain other decisions right or wrong doesn't make it any less of a red card.

But does half a dozen 'wrongs' make it right.  You need consistency so that the players know where the bar is set

[supertom]

Its not a red card for me.

I don't like the slow creep towards a no contact sport. Its late and clumsy, but its never a sending off.

I have seen these given as red and, then again, given as yellow.  No consistency.

I agree with your comment on slow creep to no contact sports.  We are seeing an out of proportion increase in cards compared with fouls.  Look at yesterday, four fouls resulting in a yellow and a straight red.

Football has become a very technical and high speed game with TV dissecting every incident.  However, expecting players to get timing spot on every time is too much.  What they should be trying to separate and punish accordingly is the malicious foul and the various forms of cheating.  I believe that cheating caught on camera should be punished with a retrospective yellow, whether the ref has seen the incident or not.

Consistency of these decisions might also be effected by how close the ref is to the incident. In this case he was pretty close and had a great view of it. Had it been Dowd for example he'd have been leant on a steward wheezing for breath at the other end of the pitch and then given a yellow just to cover his bases.

[Ads]

Its not a red card for me.

I don't like the slow creep towards a no contact sport. Its late and clumsy, but its never a sending off.

I'm not sure how stamping your studs into an opponent's ankle could be anything other than 'serious foul play".  I agree that it wasn't done with malicious intent, but then it doesn't have to be.

I don’t think he has stamped, as that would imply something malicious has happened, when as others have said, he just clumsily overarches for the ball and catches his opponent on the foot. Players shouldn’t be getting red cards for stuff like that.

 

[RussellC]

Completely agree Ads. Having your foot stamped on is a fairly common occurrence in a football match and very rarely leads to anything more severe than momentary pain, possibly a small bruise. In an absolute worse-case scenario it could chip a bone in the foot, but there was nowhere near enough force in Delph's challenge to do that.

No-one seems to have mentioned just how quickly Gomez seemed to recover form a challenge that apparently left him writhing in agony on the ground at the time. I saw numerous tackles on MOTD last night that were worse than Delph's and none of them resulted in straight red-cards and 3-match bans.

[Ads]

The exact same thing happened in a game I played in before Christmas, I move the ball on quicker than the opponent thinks and he catches my foot with his studs. It does make you shout out, as you expect it to hurt, but there was no need for the player to roll about.

The fact players feel the need to con referees is indicative at how inconsistent they are in their decisions.

[andyaston]

Whether it was a red or not we are getting a raw deal from refs this season....

Vertionghan was lucky to stay on the pitch against us!

That Mason fella would of been done for an attempted headbutt on Benteke but the ref only saw Benteke pushing him back in the face!

Gabby's sending off was a complete joke.

Westwood got crippled against Leicester by Vardy and he got away with it and we lose an important player for months.

You see all those dodgy tackles during yesterdays MOTD and only Delph gets the red.

Come on we are getting done up gone and proper, it would happen to the big 5.

[Pat McMahon]

At the time I feared it was probably a red - mainly because Delph was lunging in with his studs showing. I don't think there was malice, just clumsiness (which is no excuse, I know). Interesting to hear Jenas and Murphy on MOTD last night saying reputations precede players.

I am amazed by PWS' stats above saying that was Delph's first card of the season as for me he was always a walking yellow card. Apparently he has 21 in 94 games for us - I have no idea how that compares to other central midfielders.

Before his debut v Switzerland I told mates in the pub to watch out for his first yellow card, and he duly obliged after about 5 minutes, and was very lucky not to get a second. I think that probably attracted more attention than anything he has done for Villa this season.

[Risso]

The exact same thing happened in a game I played in before Christmas, I move the ball on quicker than the opponent thinks and he catches my foot with his studs. It does make you shout out, as you expect it to hurt, but there was no need for the player to roll about.

The fact players feel the need to con referees is indicative at how inconsistent they are in their decisions.

Or as is more likely to be the case, that fact that players routinely cheat makes it harder for referees to make the correct decision.

[ciggiesnbeer]

Those tackles get given as red but you do have to catch the ref on a bad day. We seem to have done that an awful lot this season.

[Clampy]

Going off topic slightly, who was the 4th official yesterday? My mate reckoned it was Phil Dowd but I couldn't tell properly from where we were sitting.

[dave shelley]

It wornt Dowd, I think he did the Hull game.

[pauliewalnuts]

There isn't any consistency in this sort of thing, that is definitely the case. Although i don't know how there would ever be consistency as it is a judgement made by a human being put on the spot, and therefore subject to subjectivity as well as influences from other factors (some understandable, like player reactions, others less palatable like the fact that many refs shit themselves in giving decisions against "big" clubs).

Personally, I thought it was a definite red.

I can understand why others see it differently, though, but I think the key factor here is that it was the sort of challenge which was well within that range of actions that can cause a player to get sent off - rightly or wrongly, so it was no surprise he went.

[dave shelley]

All referee's in the premier league are contracted earning  an average salary of between 70k to 85k.  Referees outside the premier league are not under contract and have other sources of income. 

The danger for referees used to lie in the dreaded assessor that sat in the stand, who, as the name implies, assessed the ref's performance.  It would be conceivable that the referee would be more worried that his performance satisfied the assessor more than anyone else.  I don't know in the digital age we live in, with all the cameras that scrutinise every move, that  the assessor still exists but, I do know that these referees are aware that their every move is under the utmost scrutiny.  Why would they wish to put such a lucrative living in jeopardy by deliberately giving the wrong decision?

Yet again, the problem of consistency raises its head.  As Paulie states, it's very difficult for the level of consistency we all seek due to the fact of how we as humans see events.  Football, is all about angles, whether playing or officiating, where you are, what you see, how you see it.  I once questioned the late Neil Midgley as to why he didn't give us a penalty (I can't remember which match) he said the incident when Gary Shaw did his diving swan impersonation, he asked me where about I was standing.  I replied somewhere on the Holte (the end where the incident took place) his reply to that was, "if I had been standing there I might have thought it was a penalty".  Can you see what I am trying to say?  As I've said before, the best any referee can do to be consistent is to be consistent with him/herself.  Such are the laws of football, wide open to interpretation.

I'm probably naïve but, I don't think referees allow their perceived dislike of teams to influence any decision they make during games.  I certainly didn't.

   http://www.tsmplug.com/football/average-salary-premier-league-referees/

 

[Risso]

I think you're right Dave.  They get assessed after games and wouldn't want to be making too many mistakes based on dislike of one team or another.