Every summer Pro Ref, the new name for the referees’ body in England, visits each training ground and runs through a series of incidents so players understand what to expect.<\/p>\n
Feedback and interaction differs from club to club. Sometimes players will get involved in healthy debates about potential fouls, although on other occasions the odd player might be caught catching a nap.<\/p>\n
Over the past few weeks players have been shown clips of two incidents which were not penalties last season, but would be given under the new guidelines. <\/p>\n
One was Brentford<\/a>‘s Keane Lewis-Potter wrestling West Ham’s Tomas Soucek at the far post off the ball. The second was Sunderland<\/a>‘s Luke O’Nien dragging down Leeds United<\/a>‘s Pascal Struijk with an arm around the neck.<\/p>\n This season, both fall into the category of a ‘non-footballing holding action that has no place on the football pitch’.<\/p>\n Webb explained how another incident showed how player opinions “can be split on a grey situation”.<\/p>\n Crystal Palace<\/a>‘s Marc Guehi was pulled down by Bournemouth<\/a>‘s Bafode Diakite, with the referee awarding a spot-kick.<\/p>\n Some players felt Guehi had engineered the contact, others believed it was a clear holding offence. <\/p>\n “One player will tell you that if a penalty is not given, they expect the VAR to be involved, knowing full well that that will highly frustrate the other half of the room, who don’t see a penalty in the first place,” Webb said.<\/p>\n Webb says giving Guehi the penalty on field was fine, but it should not be a VAR intervention. It shows the balancing act referees and VARs face.<\/p>\n As has been the case for many years, Pro Ref provides officials with pre-game dossiers about how teams play. Not to influence decisions, but to give referees the best chance of identifying potential problems.<\/p>\n “We’ve got some highly skilled analysts who do a lot of work pre-game and give information to the officials: such as what they’re likely to see, the way that the team sets up,” Webb said.<\/p>\n “It gives them a higher likelihood of looking in the right place at the right time.<\/p>\n “We’ll look at tactics that have been used. We’ll look at a team getting an attacking set-piece and adjust the position of the referee to get a beneficial angle.<\/p>\n “It’s not about saying this player is a diver and therefore he’s going to dive every time he hits the deck.<\/p>\n “An open mind’s important, but we think on balance, having information in advance is of benefit.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Every summer Pro Ref, the new name for the referees’ body in England, visits each training ground and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":599251,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[61,60,112],"class_list":["post-599250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/599250","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=599250"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/599250\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/599251"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=599250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=599250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=599250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}