Our favourite refs

Ben Williams has just hung up his whistle. What refs do the Nix perform best under?

The best referee we've had has been O'Leary by a mile. We won 2/3 games we played that he was reffing in, compared to our 44% overall win record.

I had a positive opinion of Strebre Delovski up until he failed to red card the player who opened up Smeltz's face in Dunedin.

His decision-making was kinda crap after that too

The ability of A League referees has stayed exactly the same as it was on day one, whereas the coaching and the players have improved 100's of percent. I have tried to be polite about what I think of A League referees. And although he was sometimes hard against us, I actually had time for Mathew Breeze.

Yes, but it's still the answer to the question "which referee do the Nix perform best under", despite that :P

They're all cods!

(Except Sarah Ho)

kill me now.

But you'll miss us playing in the Finals

I'm hoping it fails massively in the off line testing phase when it's not actually being used in the game, just tested in the background, and that it never actually sees the light of day.

The idea of stopping games to review plays on the video gives me the sharks.  It barely works in rugby or league and they are very stop/start games.

I can understand frustrations like this for, say, the Prem or the World Cup, but the reffing standard in the A-League is average at the best of times. I don't care if it slows down the game, because the refs have to improve, and for them to improve, we gotta do something.

What makes you think the video refs (who will be below the standard of A-League refs) will be any better.  There are plenty of situations (was there contact for example) where the camera is inconclusive - what happens then?  Love 3rd umpire in cricket (bar predictive element of hawkeye), but football is just not made for it.

plus the exhilarating thrill and sudden joy of a goal will be sucked away as we wait for 5mins for a guy to sit in a booth analysing every last detail of the lead up to see if they can find anything wrong with it. 

See: NRL. 

Imagine the nix scoring an injury time winner in the Grand final next year, only to have the joy sucked away as the referee goes upstairs and we wait 5 minutes to see if Kostas big nose strayed a millimetre offside. What a downer. 

The obvious rebuttal to that is "what if the nix concede in injury time to lose a grand final and the goal was offside" - I figure there is a margin of acceptability that sucks to be on the wrong end of, but you can understand why the ref gave it. Even then, while it sucks when those wrong decisions go against you, such incidents add to the drama and even become a part of club legend - like the hand of Payne goal against the nix. 

Now we want to lose all that and make football a series of robotic decisions? No thanks. 

You make a good point. What I'm thinking is video refs would, at least, improve the standard. The reason A-League refs are shark is not because they don't understand the laws, but because they don't have the eagle eyes or the ability to process things quickly. Video refs, with the time to make an informed decision and deliberate, would very rarely make jarring mistakes.

Yeah, every Englishman I've ever met respects and idolises Maradona's brilliant 'header' in the World Cup. You're right though. It would be annoying.

And how far back do you go?  What happens if Kosta was a nose off side, and we score a goal after keeping possession 30 seconds later? 90 seconds? 5 minutes?

that's a massive problem in the NRL system that adds an entire layer of inconsistency that wasn't there before.

Referees very rarely call things like obstruction live now, preferring to let things go and check it if a try happens to be scored.  This means if there is a hint of obstruction a team is better off taking a tackle on the 1m line, playing the ball, then falling over to score, when it won't be checked (they only check last tackle). 

To translate that to football: linesmen may stop calling borderline offside calls. The cost and criticism  of calling something borderline (or when you are say 90% sure) and getting it wrong is greater than letting it go then checking it later. Once you make the call live you can't take it back. So linesmen stop putting their flag up for borderline offsides. Very few of these actually result in goals, but a lot probably result in corners. What if a team scores from the resulting corner? That seems to add a whole new layer of inconsistency to the game, that will actually happen more frequently than it does for a goal. 

This behaviour of deferring to the video referee is completely understandable. If you make a call and it happens to be even fractionally wrong people will criticise and say you should have used video replay. You even see it in cricket when a player gets run out and is literally metres out of his crease - the umpire is 99% sure he is out, but that 1% of doubt ridiculously causes him to go to the third umpire almost every time.  

So video referees can actually lead to more incorrect decisions, than it managed to fix incorrect ones because it alters the general decision making behaviour of referees. 

Well said Tegal.  And don't get me wrong - i'm all for technology, I just don't think video replays are the right technology for football.  Goal line technology is brilliant - it doesn't interrupt the flow of the game, and happens practically instantly.  If the technology ever exists to patrol the offside line automatically that would be a great advancement.

I agree, goal line technology is brilliant. That is my favourite referee. 

Actually this is totally reasonable and a very good point with the not calling fouls and players being tackled meaning the bad calls int he previous tackle not being called.

I suppose the options are bad calls with flow of the game, or less calls at all including right or wrong ones, and stopping and starting, and even more annoyance about a wrong call.

I still feel like they should be allowed to double check a goal but where do you or don't you draw the line, not something I can answer, so as is probably is best for the sport.

I like how you've made it look like you haven't moved but have at the same time!

Fudgeing software developers being useless cods.

This is a great example of what I was referring to earlier in this thread in terms of video referees altering a refs natural behaviour when making decisions to the point that they defer to the video referee with any sort of ridiculously small amount of doubt.

At least they got the decision right in the end.... Right?

It probably took them 2 and a half minutes to get a decision

http://www.stuff.co.nz/sport/football/a-league/83515201/sarah-jones-first-kiwi-woman-appointed-to-aleague-assistant-referee-panel

She wont get booed but I expect a fair few wolf whistles.

Most from my living room

Do we now have a new contender?

I hate to say it but the majority of kiwi's that have officialled in the A-League, O'Leary included, have been dire.  He improved in the later part of his career but both him, Fox and Precious lost the Knights home games in the two seasons they existed.  Yes they were dire, but our own officials added to the woe and misery.

I think it's time that the FFA and maybe NZF made enough money available that a few referees could go full time.  We would see a massive increase in performance from them knowing that they are being treated in the same way as everyone else of importance in the game and are thus able to devote themselves 100%  continuous improvement. There would then be no need for cameras or us having to stomach the losses against Syd and Man City.

All refs in NZ and Australia have work commitments (O'Leary is a teacher (headmaster now?)). My father, a FIFA badged referee who officiated women's and youth internationals in England and NZ struggled with the balance between keeping kit, refereeing all over the place and working night shifts.

Yes!