Everton v Liverpool and Chelsea v Manchester United both saw some horrendous and incompetent officiating at their matches, but this is not a new area of our game that has suddenly become a focus of anger or frustration from paying fans or members of the public who pay TV subscriptions to watch premier league officials make horrifying and scandalous decisions that cause controversy and leave football fans feeling cheated of an honest game of football.
The fact is that referees are human and make mistakes just like us, but just like us, we have to answer for our mistakes at work or in life, the referees don’t seem to fall into that same set of rules.
The problem doesn’t lay just with the officials, the Football Association has a massive part to play in the standard of officiating of the premier league and the blame should rest firmly at their door.
The FA are responsible for the training and quality of all referees and its their lack of backbone and refusal to adapt to change that has our game in such turmoil. How many more times are we going to see last gasp goals disallowed or given when the actual decision is blatantly the complete opposite to the one the match official has chosen.
Controversy is what makes football exciting and makes great conversation amongst fans, but I don’t think Brendan Rodgers would agree with you after being cheated out of a victory in the last moments of the Merseyside derby by an incredible and absolutely scandalous decision to deny Luis Suarez a perfectly good and honest goal.
But this is not the first time that officials have tarnished and made our game a laughing stock, it happens weekly somewhere in the premier league, with a consistency record that makes our officiating reputation in the world of football a complete and utter joke.
Our officials must be held accountable for the mistakes they make, it simply is not enough to make a call on Monday to the manager who has been on the receiving end of one of their incompetent decisions and apologise, it simply is not enough and is becoming a cop out. If we made as many mistakes as they do in a month we would be unemployed simple as that.
What the spineless FA need to do is place an official with the same access with various TV screen views as SKY TV show fans at home and give the match official the power to ask the off field official for confirmation of a decision, it would take seconds to receive an answer and stop many bad decisions.
To complement that the FA must train referees to a far more superior standard to what they are at present, the FA must act if a referee has failed to provide a standard of officiating that is deemed acceptable, referees must be sacked if they continue to underperform and make poor decisions.
Clubs, players, managers and fans simply cannot continue to be cheated out of a honest game of football any longer, while the FA sit back and hide under the table like scared little boys just in case Alex Ferguson calls because he never got his way or got offended this weekend.
Brian Reece
twitter @oldfattoad