I’m getting a bit tired of discussing referees after Lincoln City games, but I’d quite like them to stop giving us reasons to.
Watford was poor in the main. We were poor with the ball, our delivery was disappointing, and nobody needs to convince me that we have things to improve.
However, none of that explains why James Bell gave Watford the throw-in from which they scored. I’ve watched it back, and I’m convinced it was ours. It looked ours in the ground, it looks ours on the replay, and I haven’t found an angle that makes me understand the decision. From there, Watford took it quickly, before they were even awarded it, and Stephy Mavididi scored the only goal.
Immediately, the discussion becomes about whether we should have defended better. Of course we should. Mavididi had too much space, but acknowledging that doesn’t mean we have to stop talking about how Watford got possession in the first place. We had set ourselves up expecting our throw. Suddenly, the ball is going the other way, against a team whose whole approach depends on closing spaces and keeping its organisation. Watford recognised that and got on with it, exactly as I’d want us to do.
The shot then took a deflection, which made it an even more frustrating way to lose. In a game where neither side looked particularly convincing going forward, that sequence carried enormous weight. We can analyse every movement after the throw, but the first error in that passage of play was the decision to give it to the wrong side. That’s why dismissing it as a throw-in misses the point. A routine decision can have a massive consequence, especially when the restart is quick. The fact that it wasn’t a penalty or a red card doesn’t make the outcome any less significant.
Let me ask you this, what was the score? 1-0, right? And from where did that ‘one’ come? A clear and obvious error. I thought Bell had generally been fine before that. I wasn’t sitting there compiling a dossier of every free kick he had given against us, ready to present my findings to The Hague, but he made one mistake that changed the game. I cannot guarantee we would have drawn had he got it right: there was plenty of football left, and pretending we can rewrite the result would be daft. I can say the only goal came from possession Watford should never have had.
Birmingham was different. I thought they deserved to win, and we gave away goals that made the good bits of our performance largely irrelevant, which was frustrating enough in itself. That doesn’t alter my view that Ethan Laird should have been sent off. His high boot was dangerous. Whether there was any malice involved doesn’t make it less dangerous, and I struggle with the idea that discussing our defending somehow deals with that incident. Birmingham could deserve their victory and still have benefited from a major decision.
Equally, playing against ten might have changed the game, but it wouldn’t automatically have won it for us. There is a perfectly sensible position between pretending the referee got everything right and declaring that we were robbed of three points.
Then there’s Millwall, where Deji Elerewe’s dismissal left us trying to protect a draw with ten men. Thankfully, we managed it, and the red was subsequently overturned. That correction couldn’t help us during the minutes we had to play without him. We also benefited there from the handball involving Reeco Hackett before our second goal. I’ll happily acknowledge that, because otherwise this becomes the sort of argument where my eyesight works brilliantly at one end and mysteriously packs up at the other.
That doesn’t cancel out the dismissal, any more than the dismissal erases the handball. Both belong in an honest assessment. Decisions going our way deserve the same scrutiny as those that leave us fuming on the journey home.
Three major grievances in four games is enough to explain why patience is wearing thin. It doesn’t require a conspiracy, an agenda or a belief that officials wake up wondering how they can ruin Lincoln City’s afternoon. Referees make mistakes, and lately we’ve had some consequential ones. What bothers me is the suggestion that criticising them amounts to making excuses for ourselves. Our performance at Watford needed to be better. Our defending against Birmingham needed to be better. Neither observation gives an official’s decision a free pass.
We spend plenty of time picking apart players, formations and substitutions. We can do the same with decisions that affect a game, provided we’re honest about the ones we benefit from. That’s scrutiny, and referees are part of the game we’re scrutinising.
I’d love to come away from QPR talking entirely about the football. Until then, I’m quite comfortable saying we need to improve while remaining angry about what happened at Watford. Playing badly doesn’t mean we forfeit the right to have a straightforward decision given correctly.
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