Читать книгу Geoff Hurst, the Hand of God and the Biggest Rows in World Football - Graham Poll - Страница 19

THE Mendes-Carroll goal (at Old Trafford on 4 January 2005) was such a blatantly wrong decision that referee Mark Clattenburg and assistant Rob Lewis beat themselves up about it. I spoke to Mark very soon afterwards and told him it wasn’t his fault and that nobody blamed him, but he was very upset because it was so clearly a goal.

Interestingly, though, at the time, Sky television’s commentators were not sure until they’d seen a replay. That is what often happens. Once we’ve all seen a dozen replays of an incident, we convince ourselves that what happened was obvious. Mark and Rob didn’t have any replays and had to go on what they’d seen at the time. The problem was that Rob didn’t give himself a chance of seeing anything much. He went into sprint mode, belting along the line to try to get back closer to the goal, and his head went down as he ran. It is easy to be critical with hindsight, but instead of racing back quite so frantically, Rob should have concentrated on the flight of the ball. So I think there is a good learning point from the Mendes-Carroll goal. It is that there are times when, as a referee or assistant, you have to accept that you must sacrifice proximity for viewing angle.

You have to keep an awareness of what is going on and what might be about to happen, and so you will notice good referees sometimes stop running forwards and take a step to one side to get a better angle. Similarly, an assistant should cover the ground as quickly as possible but while maintaining a good view. The assistant’s two main functions are to watch for offsides and to indicate when the ball goes out of play. As soon as Mendes hit his shot, there was no possibility of an offside and so Rob could and should have concentrated on ‘ball out of play’. With hindsight he knows he should have focused on the ball and the possibility that it would go into the goal.