Larry Ryan: All credit to Moyesy for seeing the referee’s point of view
MOYESY NEIGHBOUR: Is David Moyes brandishing an imaginary card at the match officials after a Premier League game last year? He looked more magnanimous after defeat by Arsenal this week.
You know when you happen across a video on Twitter or YouTube or wherever — I’m still not on TikTok — and it has a few hundred views or likes, but you are certain, if you look again later, it will have hundreds of thousands, or maybe millions? That it will be breaking the internet?
There’s a small satisfaction about it, that sense you are getting in on the ground floor of something.
Wasn’t there a touch of that about David Moyes’ post-match interview during the week, after the Hammers lost to the Arsenal?
Reckon Moyesy knew it himself. There was something in the delivery.
The way he kicked off in the traditional fashion. Furious gaffer winding up a rant: “We’ve had a weekend just gone of really soft penalty kicks … and ah …”
This was going to be another ‘game’s gone’ diatribe, wasn’t it? A lament for days when you could still tackle. A plaintive plea for common sense gone out of fashion.
It was the pause that suggested Moyesy knew he was brewing something special. It was almost classic stand-up, teeing up a punchline, though you wouldn’t necessarily associate Moyesy with the delivery of a stand-up comedian.
“... I think that Anthony Taylor may have this one right, I think he might.”
In case you missed it, Moyesy was talking about a penalty decision that had gone against his team and saw them reduced to 10 men. It was either in the ‘seen them given’ or ‘not for me’ categories, probably depending on your allegiance.
If you saw Moyesy’s debrief live, you instantly knew the gist of the social media torrent that was coming.
Refreshing. Genuinely refreshing. Honest. Refreshingly honest. Fair play. Commendable. Love to see it. Credit to Moyes. Huge credit. All credit.
And our old friend, classy. Class and dignity. Class act. Top class. Pure class from Moyesy.
Alas, we are not all as instinctively impressed. It is at times such as this that you realise how football can make you a deeply cynical individual. So before you could go any further, it was necessary to work out what Moyesy could have been up to here, with this groundbreaking gambit.
Coming from the mouth of a man like, say, Jose Mourinho, we would automatically detect chicanery at play. This could be filed as some kind of complicated double-bluff, one step along in the playbook from ‘I cannot speak’.
Or you could parse Moyesy’s words as a shrewd investment in future penalty decisions going his way. A little reminder to Anthony Taylor that the Hammers are owed one or two soft ones, down the line.
Or might Moyesy have been communicating directly with his own players which, the psychology experts tell us, is what post-match interviews are actually for?
“I think Vladimir should have got better contact on the ball,” he elaborated, of the boy Coufal, who had lunged at Lacazette, clipping the ball just before his shins. Was this some kind of ‘no excuses’ policy Moyesy was selling? Was he working on ‘culture’? Was he somewhere in high-level ‘sweeping the sheds’ territory?
That is what football has done to us. We are not used to taking anything at face value.
But, but, but, maybe we should consider Moyesy was, indeed, just being honest. He does have a track record on the honesty front. So much so that the Sunderland contingent were famously sick to the back teeth of Moyesy’s honesty, in admitting how unlikely they were to stay up under his watch.
Maybe Moyesy was being honest, and maybe, just maybe, he could have started a trend.
Perhaps, on Wednesday night, we got in on the ground floor. And when we look again, magnanimity will have become the new controvassy.
The timing would be good. We have heard often enough lately, on both sides of the water, of the crisis in refereeing. Of how refs are being driven from the game due to all the abuse and grief.
If all we want is consistency, we may very soon get it, because the same referee will be doing all our matches.
BBC Sport this week devoted a podcast to the problem at grassroots level. “A disease ruining our game,” they called it. “People just seem angrier for some reason,” said one ref. Schoolboy football in Dublin recently shut down, as refs stepped away for a weekend to highlight the problem, with the FAI’s backing. In England, the FA just launched another ‘Respect the Ref’ campaign, to try to get players, spectators, and coaches to “see the game from an official’s perspective”.
And maybe that, in an unremarkable yet almost unprecedented way, is what Moyesy did this week. Instead of talking about the officials as third parties to manipulate or even as opponents to defeat, he saw things from the ref’s point of view.
That probably shouldn’t sound as refreshing as it did. But it was a contribution from the top down, as various powers-that-be try to fix football from the ground up.
Staying with officiating, I’ve been talking to various parties from the Loughmore-Castleiney contingent this week, for a Christmas feature on their magnificent Tipperary double.
Still a bit sore, no doubt, after last Sunday, but phlegmatic enough, as they usually are. They wouldn’t mind hearing an explanation, for one or two decisions, is about as strong as they’d go.
And perhaps that could be the obvious next step in this dialogue Moyesy might just have started. Allow referees to show us they can see things from the players’ point of view, too.
One of Loughmore’s great stalwarts, Pat Cullen, even made a start on that process. Pat is gone 80, but only stopped reffing five years ago, because he didn’t want to do any more fitness tests. He shipped a bit of grief over the years, he admits, but accepts “some of the time it was my own fault”.
“Anyway,” he went on, “the day you don’t have a lad shouting from the sideline is the day there will be no GAA. The lad who is roaring is the one who has passion for the games.”
