Hands off these match officials! They’re human

From left: Mike Mwangi, Juma 'Donna' Turke (centre referee), Frank Musungu, George Okerio and Dancun Mudaki leave the pitch after the KPL match between AFC Leopards and Sony Sugar at Nyayo Stadium on May 1, 2015. PHOTO | MARTIN MUKANGU |

What you need to know:

  • To maintain high standards of football in the country, let’s invest on more match officials, the best we can find, have their actions monitored on a daily basis and reward the best to encourage in to recognise excellence.

Debate on the fallibility of Kenyan referees is one that has now grown old and to put things bluntly, it is both boring and reductive.

The latest spin by the national federation that officials who currently preside over the Kenyan Premier League are incompetent must be treated with a pinch of salt because criticism over poor standards has been in the game for long, all referees available or not.

The fact is we have not adequately invested in the men in black to ensure we get the very best people to run our football on the pitch. Period. This fight between FKF and KPL, and the barring of top referees from officiating in one league that has our best players is retrogressive and patently dangerous for football in this country.

It is retrogressive and the longer it lasts the worse our football, which has been battered from all corners in recent times, will get.

No wonder the work referees do is called a thankless job. You will never satisfy anybody.

With the benefit of television, instant replay, slow motion, still pictures and action covered from all angles, a referee’s performance can be looked at, not from the human eye perspective but technology.

And therein lies the problem. Even the most marginal of wrong decisions look like an act of complete incompetence. It makes busy bodies form mountains out of mole hills. Coaches are human.

However, listening to conversations by local football enthusiasts, it is easy to deduce that, they are not interested in “elite referees” or whatever. They want referees who can be trusted to get most of the key decisions right and at the moment; this is not happening often enough.

REFEREES INTIMIDATED

It gets more baffling when we hear that some of the referees have confessed that they are intimidated by fans of certain teams. There has been talk of some of them admitting that the fans of Gor Mahia and AFC Leopards create an intimidating atmosphere for the men in black.

It is a fact that in this day and age of television technology, no referee worth his name would deliberately make awkward calls and risk losing his badge; we should thus focus on the reason why the referees are performing below par.

Raphael Nduati and George Mwai’s performance in Gor’s match against Sofapaka and Ulinzi respectively clearly bordered on the unpalatable. But this only tells half the story. The top-flight league started weeks behind schedule because of a court injunction.

This meant that there would obviously be fixture gluts in order to make up for the lost time. Most of the referees thus found themselves refereeing at least two times a week and sometimes being fourth officials when not in the centre.

We certainly wouldn’t expect players to perform well under the same circumstances but we let our refs burn out until they can no longer put up with the tempo of the match. This causes them to make some wrong decisions. But we should not heap all the blame on them.

All over the world, there is a widespread notion that to be good referee is to be equally bad to both the teams. I have observed Kenyan refs for two years now and I get the sense that for a centre referee, the conventional way to be fair is to make an acceptable number of baffling poor decisions for each team, and all would be fine.

To maintain high standards of football in the country, let’s invest on more match officials, the best we can find, have their actions monitored on a daily basis and reward the best to encourage in to recognise excellence.