try to go as long as possible without blowing his whistle<\/a>, or stay standing in the centre circle. <\/p>\n“We used to say, ‘we’ll kick off now. Right, see how long we can go without blowing a whistle’,” Dean said.<\/p>\n
“I’ve done that a few times in the Premier League, before VAR obviously – went 20, 25 minutes without blowing a whistle.”<\/p>\n
The 58-year-old has come in for considerable criticism for his comments with another former Premier League referee, Mark Halsey, telling BBC Sport that it had added extra pressure on officials today. <\/p>\n
Dean posted a statement on his Instagram story on Friday where he did not retract his claim, but sought to explain the context.<\/p>\n
“Throughout my 25 years as a professional referee, I have always applied the Laws of the Game to the best of my ability,” Dean wrote.<\/p>\n
“My approach as a referee was always to allow the game to flow and whenever possible I preferred to apply a high threshold for contact which the players liked.<\/p>\n
“However, if I saw a foul challenge that needed me to take the appropriate action I would give it from the correct position.<\/p>\n
“At no stage was it my intention to question, criticise or undermine the integrity of refereeing in this country. <\/p>\n
“I have always respected the profession and the responsibility that comes with being a referee.”<\/p>\n
But is there any evidence that Dean did in fact play these games?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Former Premier League referee Mike Dean says he did not intend to “undermine the integrity of refereeing” after…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":836610,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[69],"tags":[403,99],"class_list":["post-836609","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-soccer","tag-soccer","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/836609","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=836609"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/836609\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/836610"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=836609"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=836609"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=836609"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}