Originally Posted by
Badly Ironed Shirt
It is implied every time a rugby player talks about football. For some reason rugby professionals keep comparing their sport with football. It's really quite strange, because they rarely compare Union with League (for example), or Union with Ice Hockey, or Union with basketball - you get the picture.
Retrospective action is the best available course to try to eliminate cheating in football - my main issue is that it cannot be extended to all levels of the game. The game is also too fluid to stop every so often to go to a video ref. We've already seen it in action, and it is shit. I wonder how infallible Owen would be without a video ref to help him out? I've seen the clips of how great a referee he is, and quite often he has to go to the third eye.
What Owen is suggesting will add more pressure onto referees, not take it away. Remember, the same laws apply in football whether it is Liverpool v Real in a European Cup final, or Grange Albion against Ely Rangers in a pre-season friendly. Whilst a Premier League referee will have the benefit of some video footage, I'm not so sure that a Championship referee will, and I'm absolutely certain that a League 1 or League 2 referee will not. If Owen's suggestion (he talks from a viewpoint of having little interest in "soccer") was taken up, referees at lower levels of football would have far too much pressure, and far too much power to influence a game.
One thing I would like to see (along with retrospective action against cheaters) - is that the manager gets a 1-game touchline ban if 2 of his players are found guilty of diving in the same season. If a third is found guilty, then it's a 2 game ban and so on.
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