Game
14, 2016-17
There was a player in last night's third round City Cup tie who had a question for me. "Are you blind?" he
wanted to know. A goal had just been scored by the opposition, and from his
position 50 yards away in the waning daylight, the home forward maintained that it had been
offside. And yet, I was allowing the goal to stand. Was there perhaps a problem
with my vision?
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| Glasses for the referee: available here |
It's a reasonable question, right? If
you're playing football and you've got a referee there, one of their core
competencies (this is a concept I learned while working at John Birt's BBC in
the 1990s) should be the ability to use their eyes as a decision-making aid. I
considered my answer, and then summoned my personal secretary from the touchline.
I dictated the following letter, which was soon enough delivered by my butler
on a silver tray to the home number 10:
"Dear Home Team Forward,
Thank you so much for your query concerning
my eyesight. Your compassion does you great credit as a human being...
Want to read more? Click here to order Reffing Hell: Stuck In The Middle Of A Game Gone Wrong by Ian Plenderleith (Halcyon Publishing), published on August 8, 2022.
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