QUIS custodiet ipsos custodes? Now there’s a Latin phrase you don’t often see in a football column.
It means roughly ‘who guards the guards themselves?’ It’s a phrase originated by the poet Juvenal in Ancient Rome almost 2,000 years ago and it’s a question that has been asked of authority ever since.
It came readily to mind on Friday night when that pillock of a Spanish referee, Alesandro José Hérnandez booked Celtic’s Leigh Griffiths for the ‘crime’ of picking up the empty bottle of Buckie that had been thrown at him by a Linfield ‘fan’ and was lying on the field of play.
Uefa’s eejit-like gauleiters then did their usual thing of compounding the idiocy by attacking the player rather than at least pointing out to the Silly Señor that he was being a prat.
Of course Griffiths should not have tied a scarf to a post, but it was done at the away end of the ground, as if to say ‘we were here’ rather than waved at the Linfield support to antagonise them.
Neverthless, Hérnandez, who had a bit of a shocker all round, must be taken to task by Uefa for his ludicrous booking. And here’s why.
The laws of the game are very specific. Under the section dealing with referees and their duties it says that a referee must deal with outside interference such as an object being thrown on to the pitch by having it “removed at the earliest possible opportunity”.
The Silly Señor would rather have left the bottle lying around than dealing with it as prescribed by the laws. That makes him guilty of a dereliction of duty and he should be suspended from refereeing any match until he learns the laws.
We see such incidences of refereeing incompetence all the time in football. Hérnandez himself was already noted as a bungler after his incredible mistakes in the Real Betis v Barcelona match in January which cost Barca the game and possibly the La Liga title.
Refereeing standards have actually improved in recent years due to the large scale introduction of full-time professional referees in major leagues, and in Scotland we have a handful of very good referees.
We all know that referees are human and make mistakes, but instead of automatically leaping to the defence of errant referees, why doesn’t Uefa just say “yep, Hérnandez made a trasero of himself and we’ll stand him down for a game or so”.
The ruling bodies never do that – though World Rugby did actually concede openly that Craig Joubert had made a major mistake when he awarded ‘that’ penalty against Scotland in the World Cup quarter final.
Such honesty about refereeing and many other aspects of their activities would actually do the football authorities a power of good.
As for the Supine Farcical Association, where is the independent examination of their treatment of the ongoing Rangers Big Tax Case fallout? Who is going to tell the SFA that copping out on this matter isn’t on?
In other words, who guards the guardians of our game?
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