There was news last week that the only Olympic Sport with tickets available was football. Some people were surprised at this, saying that Football was the Nation’s sport and they thought the tickets would be snapped up.

In actual fact the figures of the thing are quite interesting. The tickets start at £20 but rise to a quite astonishing £125, and there are around 800,000 that have been sold. This makes football the most popular Olympic sport, a fact the organisers have been keen to trumpet.

However, that only tells half of the story. The 800,000 sold still means there approximately 1.5m left and tickets are apparently available for nearly every men’s group game as well as the Quarter Finals and one of the semi’s. For the women’s game the situation is even worse, with no game – including the final – sold out yet.

On one hand this is a shame, as football really is the only truly UK wide event in London’s Olympics. Matches are taking place at places as geographically diverse as Coventry, Manchester, Newcastle, Edinburgh and Cardiff as well as at Wembley.

So the inquest has now begun as to why this should be. It seems to me that there are all sorts of reasons for the 1.5 million tickets being left. Our colleagues at cheap5aside.com, were saying that they are not gripped with Olympic fever anyway, but that is especially true of the football tournament.

People are right, we do love football in this country. But we don’t have any affinity with the football tournament in the Olympics. Team GB has never been represented before, and of course there is an on-going battle surrounding the availability of Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish players for the tournament.

Then there is the rather more important matter of Euro 2012. The battle in Poland and the Ukraine ends a matter of weeks before the Olympics begin and herein lies perhaps the biggest issue that five ringed football faces: Simply it is not the pinnacle of their career for any of the players involved. Winning the World Cup, The Premier League, Euro 2012, the FA Cup, whatever it is, they are all more important, surely than the Olympic tournament is.

The four year sporting extravaganza is about athletics, mainly, then to a lesser extent swimming and cycling. For these people the medal is what they have worked for all their lives. Is that really true if, say, David Beckham?

The organisers are anticipating a surge in interest when the draw for the competition is made, but I cant help feeling that this pie in the sky and the football in the Olympics whether it is the men’s or women’s tournament will be shown in little highlights packages to a disinterested TV audience who are eager to watch Chris Hoy, Mo Farrah, Jessica Ennis or Usian Bolt.

And if you think I am being harsh let me pose you a question: Without Googling it, who won the 2008 football championships in Beijing?

No, I don’t know either.

This column makes no apologies for yet again mentioning Tony Pulis.

The Stoke boss yet again has decided to make an idiot of himself following his Centre Half Robert Huth getting sent off against Sunderland.

The rights and wrongs of the decision not to rescind the red card are not what is being debated here, but Pulis’s reaction. First, rather than accepting the red and the subsequent three match ban, the Welshman (supported by his Chairman Peter Coates) used his press conference last week to explain that he was going to put together a DVD of all the bad challenges of the last two weekends.

Challenges, he says, that are worse than the one his player got sent off for. And thus invoking all the get out clause of all desperate managers: That of two wrongs making a right.

Then on Saturday at Craven Cottage Fulham’s new signing Pavel Pogrebnyak, who had earlier scored on his debut, committed a foul in front of the dugouts – a reasonably high tackle that went unpunished.

After this, the Potters supremo went on the attack, raging in his after match Media appearance, about the tackle: “If Chris Foy has missed it, then Kevin Friend sees it, but the lad doesn't even get a yellow card," he complained.

"The fourth official can contact the ref, so it's just not good enough really.


"It's a shocking challenge. He's gone in with his studs up and one foot off the ground and caught Wilson below the knee – it's a worse challenge than Robert Huth's by a country mile.


"The inconsistency this year has been shocking. This is a big decision that would have affected the game.


"They could have been down to 10 men in the first half. I'm not making excuses, but it doesn't help you when you get decisions like that going against you."


Now, as you might have guessed from the blatant Stoke bias to this article I am a paying supporter. I was there at Craven Cottage on Saturday with my brother like we always are, and I will confess that we – like Mr. Foy and Mr. Friend – didn’t see the challenge. We did see two bad ones in the first half, one for which Wilson Palacios was booked and one – an Andy Wilkinson kick on Damien Duff which happened right in the corner where we were sitting – which went, just like Pogrebynak’s, unpunished.


As we have said before, you cannot have the level of consistency that these managers call for, simply because referees are human, and refs do have bad games sometimes. Just like Chris Foy did in the Stoke v Spurs game in December, when I don’t recall Pulis bleating and moaning when Spurs had a goal disallowed for offside that was yards on and a player sent off who didn’t deserve to be.


Stoke City are on a bad run of results. Just like they were in October when it was all the Referees fault according to the Manager, just like they were last season when a series of bad decisions set him hopping mad.


That is the risk that Manager’s who moan about officials run. Even if they do have a valid point – and Pulis very, very rarely does – it always does look like sour grapes.
The facts are that the Referee didn’t cost Stoke City on Saturday. The team’s inability to defend, the chronic lack of threat from the forwards, and Pulis’s appalling team selection on the other hand, did.


But I suspect he knew that anyway.

When Harry Redknapp walked free from court last week not only did it set a chain of events in motion that saw the England Manager lose his job, it led to reports in the press that the trial itself had cost £8m. 

Football Franchise tweeted on Friday: So an £8m 5-year investigation to find that someone who was accused of fiddling tax on less than 200 grand was innocent #moneywellspent and they were far from the only ones to share those views.

In fact so fierce was the outcry that the HMRC released a statement last week denying that the court case had cost anywhere near that much and instead insisting that the actual cost was somewhere in the region of £1.3m, indeed it further suggested that the £1.3m figure also included the trial of former Pompey Chief Exec Peter Storrie, who it emerged had been acquitted of similar charges last year.

A spokesman was unequivocal: “There's been a lot of nonsense talked about the cost of this investigation to HMRC.” They told press, with their figures coming in at around £300,000 apparently. The other million comes from barristers fees, which in Dec 2011 stood at just over £944,000.

So the question begs itself: What price justice? And does it actually matter how much it costs to see justice done?

You can see why people got vexed by this. The investigation into Redknapp has gone on for five years and was all to do with the sort of sums that Carlos Tevez takes home per week.

But, is that the point? Surely you don’t want to get into a situation where you are looking for value for money in justice and cases don’t go to court because you can’t afford to see it through?

However, on the other side of that you do have to wonder if, in these times of fiscal hardship and cutbacks and budget deficits whether it should have taken five years to investigate something and bring it to trial – especially when you consider the fact that Storrie had already been cleared (that detail wasn’t reported – and rightly so, for fear of prejudicing the court case).

Personally I am inclined to think that, when all things are considered, the cost of things isn’t important when it comes to the law. You can’t get in a situation where people think to themselves “I can get away with this because they can’t afford to investigate.” And the actual cost of the crime – as we have pointed out already, in this case it was considerably less that what some Premier League players earn in a week – shouldn’t really be a consideration.

Of course, in this particular Messrs Mandaric, Redknapp and Storrie have been vindicated in their belief of their innocence and are free to carry on their lives. That being the case, it easy to point fingers and suggest that money has been wasted. But I wonder if that had been said if the Spurs boss and the Sheffield Wednesday owner were in prison this week?

If the HMRC are to be believed, rather than the more lurid reports, then the £1.3 million is a tiny, miniscule drop in the ocean compared the bank bailouts, or MP’s expenses. Or indeed just over a sixth of what the outgoing England Manager was paid – and probably just about what he received as a pay-off.

I wonder if ‘Arry will be cheaper when he takes over?

Mick McCarthy’s sacking earlier this week came after a dismal performance in the Black Country derby brought into sharp focus what is a pretty sorry season for the football teams of the Midlands.

As a proudly Midlands based firm, Leisure Leagues has many members of staff who support the teams from the Central belt of the UK, and those of us that support Premier League Teams in particular are not having a great time of it. Indeed at the time of writing the regions four Premier League Teams occupy positions in the bottom eight of the table.

At the time of writing, prior to this week's midweek fixtures, the Championship fares a touch better with the form team – Birmingham – sitting pretty in third and looking good for an immediate return to Premier League football, with Leicester and Derby, from the region’s Eastern fringes comfortably in mid-table (although whether either would feel that is success would be open to question) at the bottom are Coventry, who have lurched from one hapless result to another, with Forest sitting just above them.

It’s a similar story in League One, with Notts County having a middling campaign while Walsall and Chesterfield flounder and whilst Cheltenham, Shrewsbury and Oxford (and to a lesser extent Port Vale and Burton) are doing well in League Two Hereford are struggling and Northampton prop things up.

This pattern of mediocrity isn’t anything new and there must be a reason why such a massive area is – it seems - totally unable to compete with the football powerhouses of London and the North West.

The Football League was formed in 1888; with the driving force behind it a Director of Aston Villa, William McGregor. Reflecting the late 19th century dominance of the Midlands and The North the 12 founding teams were Villa, Wolves, WBA, Stoke, Derby, Notts County, Accrington, Blackburn, Everton, Burnley and Preston. Come the end of the season, perhaps setting a pattern, Stoke were bottom, with Preston’s “Invincibles” team winning the thing at a canter.

There have been golden periods, for example the late 1970s and early 1980s when Derby, Forest and Villa won the Championship, but largely, although Villa and Birmingham have both won League Cups, Coventry took the FA Cup in a thriller in 1987 and Stoke got to last years Final for the first time in their history, they have been barren years since.

While this has been going on The North West has prospered, despite no greater geographical and economic advantages while London has got in on the act too – although they do have elements stacked in their favour.

So the question remains as to why this should be? And the answer might lie in the lack of players the Midlands produces. In the England World Cup squad of 2010 there were just two Midlands born players – Emile Heskey and Joe Hart – and the number won’t be much higher in 2012. Which for an area of the size we are talking about is pretty shameful.

And yet, occasionally we can find the outstanding man of their generation, Stanley Matthews was born in Stoke on Trent (although won his only trophy in the North West) and The Munich Air Disaster robbed Manchester United of perhaps the Busby Babe with the potential to be best of all, Dudley born Duncan Edwards.

But the fact is that the Midlands has never produced the quality of player of the other regions. England’s World Cup winning squad of 1966 had, just like their 2010 counterparts, just two Midlands born men – Gordon Banks and Ron Flowers. When it comes to the middling nature that besets the game in the middle of the country it seems that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

It was certainly a weekend for apologies.

First Carlos Tevez said he wanted to come back to Manchester and help City win the league (surely the right thing for all concerned as this blog suggested a fortnight ago) then Mick McCarthy had to say sorry for his teams disgraceful second half capitulation in the Black Country derby. But they say these things come in threes and the one we all not just wanted, but needed to hear came too.

As we have said before on this blog, somebody, somewhere at Liverpool Football Club needed to take a firm lead on the Luis Suarez issue. It did appear that nobody had, and the events of Saturday lunchtime showed just how much it had got out of control.

Saturday, at Old Trafford, was the time to publically draw a line under the matter of what Suarez did or didn’t mean when he used racist language towards Evra in October, but what actually happened did anything but.

Quite what was going through the head of Suarez when he refused Evra’s hand only he knows, but in doing so there is little doubt he inflamed a situation that needed calming. Then Kenny Dalglish decided to give a rather bizarre post match interview to Sky where he claimed he “didn’t know” what happened pre-match.

The actions of Liverpool football club since Suarez was found guilty of racism have been ill-thought out at best and disgraceful at worst. I don’t think it is going to far to suggest that the image of one of the great clubs of World football – never mind the UK – has been damaged by not just what happened, but by what didn’t. There has – it seems to an outsider – been no clear leadership from the Liverpool hierarchy, who you would have thought would have been tremendously unhappy at seeing the adverse publicity.

Which is why there simply had to be an apology. Suarez pointedly stopped short of apologising to Evra when he said: “I have not only let [Dalglish] down but also the club and what it stands for and I'm sorry. I made a mistake and I regret what happened.


"I should have shaken Patrice Evra's hand before the game and I want to apologise for my actions. I would like to put this whole issue behind me and concentrate on playing football." But it was a start.
Dalglish too finally showed some contrition: "All of us have a responsibility to represent this club in a fit and proper manner,” he said.


"That applies equally to me as Liverpool manager. When I went on TV after yesterday's game I hadn't seen what had happened, but I did not conduct myself in a way befitting of a Liverpool manager during that interview and I'd like to apologise for that."

But what was interesting, more than any of that – and to be blunt both these “statements” were most probably written by someone in the Liverpool press office who had to give up their day off – was that this time the Managing Director and owners got involved.


MD Ian Ayre couldn’t have been much clearer saying that: “"Luis Suarez was wrong to mislead us and wrong not to offer his hand to Patrice Evra. He has not only let himself down but also Kenny Dalglish, his team-mates and the club. It has been made absolutely clear to Luis Suarez that his behaviour was not acceptable"

And a “source” close to the owners apparently told the BBC – and you can read this as you like – that “no one is bigger than the club. Apologies were necessary.” These apologies should have come a lot sooner than they did – and certainly after the ridiculous decision to wear those shirts at Wigan, but at least they have now come.


But you do wonder why they came. Maybe there is genuine contrition from the people involved, maybe there is genuine outrage at board level, but I will wager that also that there economic considerations. Liverpool have sponsors. Liverpool have sponsors with big pockets and lots of influence, but in return they want to be associated with a clean brand, not a brand where one of the star players acts like that and the Manager appears to back him.

It is said that Suarez has a future at Anfield if he shows what is termed as “better judgement” in the future. The same good judgement, not to mention proper leadership, is something that those within the Ivory Towers at Anfield would do well to exercise themselves.

So here we are again with England looking for a new Manager.

The fallout from the John Terry affair cost the England Manager his job. And, strangely you can see right on both sides of the argument.

The FA had no real choice but to sack Terry as England skipper. The allegations surrounding his use of racist language to Anton Ferdinand when Chelsea played QPR earlier in the season have cast a cloud over the whole season. This was brought to a head last week when the date for the court trial that will prove Terry’s innocence or otherwise was set as the day after Euro 2012 finishes.

This would mean that the spectre of a rather unedifying court case would overhang an England campaign which is already hamstrung by the fact that Wayne Rooney is missing the first couple of games after his ill judged moment of madness. Can you imagine the media scrutiny that would have been on Terry and Rio Ferdinand? It was a situation that could not be allowed to spiral any further out of control than it already was.

It was, however, a situation that needed the Manager to be consulted. Especially when that Manager, like Capello did with Terry, re-instates the player as skipper after originally sacking him for his misdemeanours. From this we can deduce that, whether or not the England Captain is important or not in terms of being a leader on the pitch – and the image of a blood-soaked Terry Butcher battling bravely to see his team home is one which is best consigned to history – that Terry was indeed Fabio’s man. So for the FA to sack Terry without consulting the boss can be viewed as a slight at best, or a deliberate attempt to undermine him at worst.

Indeed it is not hard to see it as the latter case, which is why there is right on the part of Capello too. Here is a man, who lets be honest, has not been exactly an unqualified success in his spell in charge, a man who has been vilified by sections of the press for his salary, for his use of English, for his tactics and pretty much everything else. So faced with all these points and now having his Captain sacked without, it seems, any sort of consultation, he has decided enough was enough. He resigned on a point of principle you cannot argue with him.

Which leads me to believe that neither side will be too upset at what appears to be a far from amicable parting of the ways. Capello is probably happy to be out of it and will probably land a plumb club in the summer (for example Inter Milan are looking for a new Manager apparently) while the FA are probably happy to be able to make a clean start.

At the press conference that has just taken place as I write this, the FA have announced that Stuart Pearce will take over as boss for the game with The Netherlands at the end of February. They also said there was “ no guarantee” that the next Manager had to be English.

Surely , though, this would be a mistake, after the expensive appointments of Messrs Eriksson and now Capello didn’t work perhaps the time is now here to look for an English (or at the very least British) boss – unless they can somehow tempt Jose Mourniho to the job this time. I am not sure I believe those words anyway to be totally honest. When the FA begin work on the “shortlist” they claim they are going to make, I am willing to bet it only has one name on. That of Mr. H Redknapp.

Lets be honest, he can’t do much worse than the last English incumbent of the job, can he? But one piece of advice: he want might to avoid using an umbrella on the touchline.

So Fabio kissed goodbye to a £6m a year contract last night, and apparently did so on a point of principle.

Good luck to him, but as someone remarked this morning it’s a damn sight easier to have principles when you are on £6m a year than when you are on £6 an hour.

The fact of the matter is, though, that no one would actually give a monkeys what Fabio Capello had earned during his tenure as England boss if he had actually done a good job.

People talk about value for money (and god knows this website wouldn’t exist if people didn’t demand it) but what people value more than anything – and this is especially true of sport – is that the person we are paying these exorbitant sums actually wins something and in turn makes us feel good.

On the BBC News last night the journalist Mihir Bose was trying to make the comparison between Capello’s (it must be said exorbitant) salary and the bonus which Banker Stephen Hester refused last week under public pressure. But that rather misses the point.

As much as the callers to phone-ins like to say words to the effect that “if I did my job that badly I would be sacked” in relation to a player who has a bad game, or more likely a referee, the same employment rules do not apply.

With sports (and most importantly football seeing as that’s what we are about at cheap5aside.com) we live vicariously. Think of the language you use: “We played well.” “We were crap”. When things get really bad there will be some variant of “you’re not fit to wear the shirt.” Will be sung, you can bet on it. The teams we support are part of us, in a way that wear you bank isn’t and never will be

The big difference between any footballer and Stephen Hester is that we love football, but we have to go to the bank.

That doesn’t mean though, that we are here to be ripped off. Which is why footballers get abuse when they don’t perform, its why Managers are under pressure, its why Capello was never widely loved. If they don’t provide us “value for money” then we will come down on them like a tonne of bricks – and all of a sudden we will care what wages they get.

Of course, this loyalty only refers to the 11 aside game, when it coes to 5 a side, we only want a good product. Here we genuinely want value for money and here, we will all happily leave on a point of principle.

Rip us off at your peril.

On Monday night, it probably would have been beneficial for all concerned if Luis Suarez had slipped quietly back into action after his eight game ban was completed.

But it didn’t happen, did it?

And it didn’t happen for two reasons. First he was booked – and in the view of many in the Football Business office he was lucky not to get sent off – for kicking Scott Parker, and second, because Kenny Dalglish decided that a matter that should have had a line drawn under it was not, in fact, closed. Instead he decided that everyone – yet again – needed to hear his opinions on what did or didn’t happen between his player and Patrice Evra that day at Anfield.

The Liverpool boss has been widely quoted as saying in his post match interview: "It's fantastic to have him back. He should never have been out in the first place.”

Leaving aside whether the Uruguayan should or shouldn’t have been suspended for his comments that day (and lest we forget the words he used to Evra are not in dispute, merely whether they were intended in a racist way) surely Dalglish is a clever enough individual to know that what he was saying was potentially inflammatory given that the two sides meet this weekend, for the first time at Old Trafford since it happened in October.

When the giants clashed the other week in the FA Cup The FA (in, it must be said, a rare attack of good sense) wrote to both clubs and asked them to refrain from talking about the incident, but unfortunately no one seems to issued such an edict this time around.

And yet, this is no ordinary rivalry. Liverpool v Manchester Utd is perhaps the bitterest antipathy in English football, it is a game that can always have the potential for trouble, even before Suarez and Evra is added into proceedings and certainly it didn’t need the rather unfortunate input of the Liverpool boss.

But should we be surprised? Everything that Liverpool FC have done recently has made a bad situation worse. The stupid t-shirts the squad (including Suarez) and the Manager wore at Wigan before Christmas outraged anti-racism campaigners and according to reports even insiders at Anfield think they were a mistake.

Then there was the bluster about their appeal against the ban – one which they backed down on, when, lets be honest, it became expedient for them to do so. This was topped off with a rather daft statement they made on their website which insinuated Evra was guilty of all manner of things. The whole unedifying escapade shows the club in a bad light.

It is tempting to suggest that they should have showed some humility, but the time for that has passed. What they should have now done was nothing at all, but unfortunately no one told their manager.

Someone who was famously shy and distrustful of the Media when he was a player and reticent to speak to them in his first spell as boss, now can’t stop making statements – and football is all the poorer for it

It is not for us –for all sorts of reasons – to speculate as to the guilt or otherwise of Messrs Mandaric and Redknapp.

But there is one thing we can speak about, which has become common knowledge as part of the evidence is the issue of managers receiving part of the fees for selling players to other clubs.

Redknapp, it emerged, received in the region of £200,000 for selling Peter Crouch to Aston Villa in 2002, and these payments are common place.

They were written into his contract, so just be clear, I am not suggesting in any way that anyone to do with the transfer acted improperly and the payments were perfectly legal and above board – but were they right?

Is it not a conflict of interests, or more accurately, can a conflict of interests not be suggested? For example, to take Peter Crouch since he is the named player in the deals, if Crouch was scoring goals and Portsmouth were going for Promotion and a club comes in with a big bid, does the manager – in this case Redknapp - keep him in order to further those promotion prospects, or does he recommend the player be sold for personal gain?

As James Lawton put it in The Independent last week: “The practice in general opens up the issue.”


“At what point,” argues Lawton. “Might a manager, conscious of the uncertainties of a results-oriented business where pressure on the jobs of even the most distinguished operators has never been so great, be tempted to put his own interests before those of his club, and by extension, the fans who supply its lifeblood?”


And isn’t that the crux of the thing? Is it right that this is allowed to happen?


Redknapp isn’t the only manager to benefit in this way, of course. It appears that Dario Gradi’s fabled Crew Alex production line also produced plenty of cash for him as he personally benefitted from the transfers of the likes of David Platt, Robbie Savage and Dean Ashton. Gradi’s presence on the board at the Alexandra Stadium on Gresty Road further exacerbates the situation.


Although the Italian is no longer the Manager of the now League Two side he still retains his right to a percentage of player transfers out of the club – and with the likes of Nick Powell and Max Clayton currently starring for the England U-19 side he may well be getting to top up his ISA again soon.


There are, I am sure many within football who cannot see what the fuss regarding these payments is about. In his aforementioned piece in The Independent last week, Lawton quotes “an experienced football administrator” as saying: “The system can be justified... a manager, who has no kind of job security, does a good job, makes the club a huge profit on an individual player, so why shouldn't he have his share? Like the bankers do when they improve the figures.”


Although even here this person agrees that there is a potential for wrong-doing to at least appear to be done. "The potential problem lies in the possibility of some managers and players maybe being tempted to collude over their short-term interests rather than the long-term ones of the club.” Which is an interesting way of putting it.


The issue at hand here is not whether these payments are legal and above board – they clearly are – the issue at hand is rather they are right.


And if that is hard to quantify, then what might be harder to do is to decide whether to allow the practice to continue. At this point, now these payments are in the public domain, do the authorities need to have a look at what is going on here and perhaps act accordingly, before this rather murky aspect of football business really get too far out of hand?

Amit Bhatia became the latest person at QPR to take to Twitter to air a grievance last week.

It does rather seem that down Loftus Road way that anything more than 140 characters doesn’t need to be said, given the way that Joey Barton and co-owner Tony Fernandes behave, but Bhatia took to that medium to become the latest person within football to call for the introduction of a “referral” system in football.


Bhatia said (one assumes in a series of tweets) "I'm convinced it's time to allow the challenge system in football. Almost all other sports around the world allow it now. We have to have some kind of video replay system so that harsh decisions can be reviewed. So much is at stake in every game. In a season when results count, every decision really does matter and I can already think of a few decisions that have cost us points [in the Premier League].


"And it's not just us, but all the other clubs too. Mistakes are made. Decisions are difficult and that's fine, but why not allow those difficult decisions to be reviewed? One challenge per half per manager wouldn't slow the game down by any more than 30 seconds. I think it's got to happen. Every fan and player in the land would appreciate a fair review of a difficult decision. It's not rocket science. And my rant isn't about today's decision. It's a general observation about football and applies to us all who want fairer decisions."
To be fair Bhatia isn’t the first person in football to express these sentiments. Other football figures have also made a call for the challenge system to be implemented, in a similar way to how it is in cricket and tennis.


It is the first of these sports that interests us at www.referee-jobs.com (given that tennis isn’t a sport and shouldn’t be taken seriously….) and the bald facts are that the decision review system in cricket presents more questions than answers.


Because of the vagaries of the hawk-eye system (that is the computer generated prediction system that works out where the ball would go) cricket has to adopt the “Umpires Call” decision. Which means that if there is a big enough margin for error and the ball, say, was clipping the stumps they back the umpire, so if the on-field umpire has given a wicket then it is out, if he has said “not out” the decision is not overturned.
Which is fine until you factor in the fact that effectively means the same decision is both “out” and “not out” so exactly who does that help? And how does that stop confusion?


My worry when this is applied to football is a simple one, if a system that is supposed to help referees only creates more grey areas, doesn’t the situation just get worse?
And anyone who has watched cricket in the last couple of years has seen the rise of the so called “tactical review,” that is, when a team has two reviews left they will just “take a punt” and see whether they have taken a wicket or whether they can keep all their batsmen on the field. Usually, of course, the umpires decision is right and the game is held up for no apparent reason, but can you imagine this delaying tactic being applied to football?


Take the game between Manchester United and Stoke City on Tuesday night. It is reasonable to assume that Stoke would have appealed the first half penalty that was given for Jermaine Pennant’s foul on Patrice Evra, and its equally reasonable to assume that it would have taken a couple of minutes to make the decision, such were the fine margins involved. Ref Mike Jones would have been found to be correct and the penalty would have been awarded. So far, so good, except that all this time Javier Hernandez has been standing, waiting to take the penalty – which has everybody knows is hard to do, so in that respect were Manchester United being disadvantaged?


The other crucial thing about the system is it allows for human error. Anyone who saw the staggering decision from third umpire Billy Bowden not to give a wicket when a decision was appealed by Pakistan in the second test match last week (the ball was clearly hit by the England batsman and was clearly caught by the fielder but according to Bowden the was “no clear evidence” to overturn the on field umpires original not out decision) would have been left scratching their heads.


Bowden is not a great umpire (Sky TV pundit Bob Willis famously suggested that he should take to the field in floppy shoes and a red nose) but that rather is the point. Those clamoring for reviews would do well to think on the fact that allowing Managers to challenge decisions would undermine the referees authority (and a leading cricket umpire gave up his job in protest at his decisions being constantly questioned), and not only that it’s a far from perfect system with too many grey areas - and crucially one which still allows for human errors – and is that really something that football needs?