Quote ="fatbaztod100" A touch judge can call any offence but the referee can choose to ignore it or call it if he chooses so. Is this right?'"
The TJs are under instruction from the referee, whatever they call, he still decides whether to ignore them or not. In the past I've received instructions that include:
"anything you see, come on and I'll back you up" - A very dangerous statement to make, simply because I've experienced some TJs who want nothing less than to referee from the touchline.
to
"Right, this game's on telly, so all I want you to do is mark touch and signal goal kicks" - This led to me starting to get changed again and it was only the intervention of the Controller of Referees that stopped me leaving the dressing room and driving home.
I officiated before the era of mic'ing up officials (thankully, they'd have needed to bleep half of my instructions during a game) and the only chance a TJ had of informing a ref of players constantly creeping offside, would be at a stoppage in play. If I was in the middle, I'd tell my TJs that I would usually back them up but if I considered I had a better view of an incident, I may override them. It's all about working as a team, unfortunately there were and still are, some referees whose ego appears to be far bigger than the game.
I've not bothered voting in the poll because this really is yet another pointless thread. Apart from offering an opportunity to some armchair officials to have a bitch & moan, what do you expect it to achieve? Fans have bitched and moaned about officials since the game started. We now have younger and fitter referees than we have ever seen in the past. If a player intercepts and goes the length of the field, usually the closest person on the field to him will be the referee. The speed of the game, at most levels has increased. When any official moves up a grade, it does take some time to get used to the changes and to think that bit quicker. No one would expect a Championship player to step up to Superleague and perform at the top level immediately, so why would they expect a referee to do so?
A couple of developments I would like to see are:
1) Stop using Grade 1 referees to run touchlines: they are completely different disciplines and a TJ and referee are looking at different aspects of the game.
2) Wherever possible, utilise the referee and TJs as a team and keep them together for as many matches as is practical. This offers them an opportunity to develop a bond and should help iron out many idiosyncracies, if nothing else, it would be easier to spot any consistent failings and work to rectify them.
I'm not saying that everything is fine and no improvements can be made. Some refs are more keen on patrolling certain aspects of the game than others, just as some players prefer to pass one way or step off one particular foot. We are dealing with human beings here and as long as that is the case, there will be anomalies. There's also the situation where players attempt to break a referee's concentration, I been asked if I've booked my holidays yet by an "old head", whose sole intention was to break my concentration on the game.
Of course it is a simple matter to count up to six tackles but that's not all a referee is doing, he's got many more things his brain has to compute at the same time, all usually done at full-speed and in real-time, without the benefit of instant replays from numerous angles, let alone the "expert" views of clueless commentators and speccies.
