Akil Howson will become the first black official to feature in an FA Cup final when Chelsea take on Manchester City next month.<\/p>\n
The 35-year-old has been named as an assistant referee for the game at Wembley on 16 May. <\/p>\n
Darren England will referee the showpiece event for the first time, having previously being the fourth official at the 2025 final and an assistant referee at the 2015 final.<\/p>\n
Tim Wood is the second assistant and Sam Barrott has been chosen as the fourth official.<\/p>\n
Video assistant referee (VAR) duties will be taken on by Peter Bankes, assisted by Nick Hopton. <\/p>\n
Howson, who is from the Leicestershire & Rutland Football Association, has been part of the Premier League’s Select Group 1 for the last three seasons.<\/p>\n
Professional Game Match Officials (PGMO) are making efforts to diversify the refereeing pathway.<\/p>\n
Farai Hallam, Ruebyn Ricardo and Sam Allison now officiate in the top two divisions of the men’s game. <\/p>\n
Paul Howard has progressed through an enhanced training programme to operate regularly as a VAR in the Premier League.<\/p>\n
For referee England, this will be a significant milestone on his rehabilitation from his mistake during Tottenham’s game against Liverpool in September 2023.<\/p>\n
Acting as the VAR, England incorrectly interpreted the on-field decision which led to a Luis Diaz goal incorrectly being disallowed for offside. <\/p>\n
The Sheffield & Hallamshire official did not referee a Premier League game for almost three months after the error, before being eased back into top-flight duty.<\/p>\n
The 40-year-old, who was added to Fifa’s list of international referees in 2022, will now get the chance to take charge of the marquee game on the English football calendar.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Akil Howson will become the first black official to feature in an FA Cup final when Chelsea take…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":557299,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[218,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-557298","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-football","tag-football","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/557298","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=557298"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/557298\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/557299"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=557298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=557298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=557298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}