After a few television replays the consensus seemed to be that Newcastle had been a little unlucky and perhaps deserved the benefit of the doubt, but the referee did not have those replays to hand.Īnd even if he had, supposing one of the attackers had been standing two feet closer to Joe Hart. How on earth were the match officials supposed to work out, given the speed of the shot and the suddenness of the strike, whether any or all of the three Newcastle players caught in offside positions were impeding or distracting the goalkeeper? The referee could only make one decision or the other, and whatever he decided one team was going to be mightily aggrieved. Take Cheik Tioté's disallowed goal for Newcastle United against Manchester City a couple of weeks ago. Rugby followers might enjoy discussions and debates over how hard you have to hit someone to deserve a straight red card but that does not mean the concept transfers easily to football, where there are already too many grey areas when no one is quite sure whether the referee has got it right or wrong. Maybe football referees would not be such pushovers, yet at the very least a sin-bin option would introduce another area of doubt, another subjective decision for the already overloaded official to make. The thinking was that players would soon cut out the transgressions once they knew they could be sent off the field for 10 minutes but, as you can see, referees were soon using the sin-bin for completely different purposes. While that is perhaps an extreme example, bear in mind that sin-bins were initially introduced in rugby league to deal with technical infringements such as persistent offside or scrum feeding, offences that irritated opponents and spectators but did not necessarily warrant the award of a penalty and therefore a points scoring opportunity.
That's what happened in rugby, and if you would like to see it in action check out this clip complete with priceless commentary, from a game almost 20 years ago. Inevitably, the option of sending a player to the cooler for a specified length of time would come to be used as a cop-out by referees, an easy option.
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