Watched 3 PL matches this weekend, and all three were marred (and the outcome ultimately decided) by very poor officiating. Obviously it's a thankless task (though they are paid generously) and subject to bigoted 'opinions' from many angles, but it just feels as if the officials are too often failing to meet a reasonable standard.
The Merseyside derby (Andre Marriner): Of course passions will run high in a derby, but the ref seemed to lose control, allowing the game to descend into a state where reckless tackles were flying in all over the pitch. He should have managed this by booking players at the right time, and thus set the limits for what he'd accept. The linesman disallowed Suarez's late winner, with replays illustrating his decision seemed to be based on no more than guesswork (very late flag, probably based on inferring Suarez was offside based upon the ending positions of players). But Suarez should have already been off the park after his clearly intentional and hugely dangerous raking of an opposition player's Achilles.
Arsenal v QPR (Anthony Taylor): For me this was the quintessential performance of an over-officious referee who doesn't seem to understand football. His 'speciality' seems to be awarding a free kick any time a clean tackle is made, but where the tackler makes even the most incidental contact with the ball carrier (at least he was consistent with this, and for both sides); if this is modern football then we might as well make it a full non-contact sport and stop teaching slide tackling at any level. Apart from this he just came across as a very weak referee, allowing walls to encroach to 6 or 7 yards away for every free kick, and like Marriner failed to establish a framework for what was acceptable and not (inconsistent from minute to minute). Arsenal's winner was also offside, so another result decided by the officials.
Chelsea v Utd (Mark Clattenburg): As opined earlier, one of the poorest refereeing performances in recent memory. Again, a very difficult matchup to officiate over, but his stance seemed to be to take an activist approach to officiating, being keen to make a decision either way over every little incident, rather than letting the innocuous, indeterminate events go in order to avoid making the game about himself. To me, it looked like he got both yellow cards for simulation wrong, and of course the officiating team failed to spot Hernandez was offside for United's winner. The result may have ended the same anyway with Chelsea down to ten, but I doubt anybody can feel that what was a hugely entertaining heavyweight match was ruined by the officials. Very, very poor.
-------
I thought it was interesting, though, that the French journalist Philippe Auclair asked the question following this weekend, "Is the Premier League still about football, or just about narratives related to it, a screen on which to project neuroses and prejudice?" In a seemingly rational world, football is entire irrational. Clubs are companies that fail to follow their accepted purpose of maximising profit. A good deal of the journalism appears to be entirely spurious (as best evidenced by the @footballagent49 Twitter account, where an 18 year old managed to dictate football transfer headlines with carefully judged, but baseless tweets). A fan of one team could wail about injustice having been subject to a certain set of events one week, but then the following week benefit from the same event and yet scream to the hilltops that it is entirely justified. An individual could be horrified by a case of discrimination at their workplace, but were it to involve a leading player at their football team they will subscribe to the most unrealistic interpretation in order to deny any culpability. General understandings about the state of football finance / clubs' finances are established by people who have no background in these matters, and are often entirely wrong. In the bigoted, parochial arena of football tribalism, and I'm as guilty as any, the game seems to be completely willfully ignorant. Football seems to provide the platform for any prejudice that is largely indefensible based on our supposed current social norms to attract a significant interest group to defend it at all costs. It's a bit of escapism from daily life, but I wonder whether it's just an opportunity to let out a bit of stress and immaturity at the end of the week, or as Auclair alludes to is rather a reflection of our inner prejudices.