'RACIST' REFEREE WASTES POLICE TIME.

I find it astonishing that not only the Football Association but now the Metropolitan Police are engaged in investigating allegations of racism against a referee.

 

I'm not a football fanatic but I'm well aware that referees habitually face a barrage of shouted abuse from the players whom they are supposed to be controlling.The players cheat and foul their ways through match after match while the referees exercise almost no real control; every decision of any note that they make is disputed, often vehemently, by the penalised side. Referees are viciously criticised by players, managers and the media; in-depth post-match examination of slow motion replays is used to seek out every possible mistake. Now we have a referee not only being accused of using 'inappropriate language' but also being subject to a criminal investigation into what were his precise words. From a manager's perspective, this is, of course, all great news, with yet another means of intimidating referees into virtual impotence having been discovered.

 

I would have thought that the police had far better things to do than to waste time and precious resources on such a trivial and pointless investigation. Football is not a sport played by well brought up gentlemen who never use foul language; it's a high profile business in which grossly overpaid yobs kick lumps out of each other and habitually curse and swear at each other and at the referee. In such an environment, discovering whether 'a' abused 'b' is of little, if any, significance, regardless of what actual words are supposed to have been said. Any significance the issue does have should be for the FA to worry about, not the police.

 

If my house was burgled, I'd be lucky to get a visit from the police within several days. If I call, or am claimed to have called, a coloured person by some words that they consider to be 'racist' and they make a complaint, I'd be pretty sure to be arrested and dragged off to the local nick within a couple of hours. Why is this ? Who is the greater criminal - the burglar who invaded my house, wrecked it and made off with an assortment of my belongings, or the person who calls another a nasty word ?

 

In this country we have got our priorities horribly wrong; as a result, real crimes have been relegated in importance in favour of imagined 'social crimes'. What a farce.