Crap Referees

[ToryTom]

Someone on Twitter made a list of seventeen incorrect decisions we'd been on the wrong end of this season. That works out at one every two matches (though the spread is different of course).

That's a *lot* of bad luck. I thought refereeing decisions 'evened themselves out' over the season.

As if we have been the only team to get howlers this season. Wolves have had it at least as bad. They aren’t going around making unsubstantiated implications of cheating. The truth is the standard of officiating in the premier league is shocking and getting worse. VAR has in part been a factor in the deterioration of standards and how it is used currently is making it worse still. Some fans are coming over as paranoid and obsessed with being victims. Truth is referring is poor and our team is not very good and capable of getting itself clear from a relegation scrap also involving three of the weakest to compete in the league at the same time.

No one has said that Forest have been exclusively wronged by bad decisions. And dismissing potential bias as incompetence is as flaky as claiming as fact that that Forest are being deliberately targeted. None of us bar Atwell know what was in his head when rejecting three valid penalty calls. But conflict of interest protections exist throughout organisational cultures precisely in order that the potential for decisions deriving from self interest are obviated. The PGMOL/Webb wilfully discarded conflict of interest protections in this case. They are also avoiding transparency around Atwell's decisions, creating smoke and mirrors around the extent to which Forest objected prior to the game, and are benefitting from a media establishment clamour that may well yet see Forest demonstrably punished for speaking up. None of this smells good, and incompetence alone does not explain the attempted cover up.

I bet Huddersfield Towns fans are having a chuckle about the years of some of ours about refereeing decisions in big matches. There wasn’t conspiracy then to get us back into the premier league and there isn’t one now to take us down. There are a lot of rubbish officials. Other teams like Wolves have probably been the victim of worst howlers than us this season