Interesting quote didn’t know that, thanks.

I think it overestimates the powers of the justice system. You can’t prevent someone posting something online and it going viral, surely?

How would it stop people thinking something?

I don’t think it’s that simple.

I think 3.2% of sexual assault cases lead to a conviction.

The way the law works, you only need to prove reasonable doubt which is incredible easy when consent is a concept.

They estimated 85,000 women a year are raped or sexually assaulted. 2022 there were 2,223 charges of rape.

There does seem to be a priority to protect innocent men against potentially malicious allegations, over prosecuting rapists and reducing the number of women being raped.

If you remove or erode the social unacceptability of rape and sexual assault, that’s also incredible detrimental.

To me, it does seem more likely a women isn’t lying than is & knowing that it’s hard to prove, I do still think there needs to be some action.

I’d like to see a campaign or something by the league. Creating a bit of a dialogue about sexual assault.

It’s why I think a stronger female presence in the game is so important. We need more women’s voices in the game

Updating the public is irrelevant. The accused, the victim and just judicial system don’t care if the general public feel uninformed on progress and nor should they

Be a lot more interesting to see this via academy rather than club they played at.

Thinking about West Ham: Ferdinand, Joe Cole, Lampard, Carrick, Defoe, Ince, Glen Johnson - they must all have minimum 50 caps each. Which is so impressive for 1 academy. But vast majority of their caps came once they left West Ham.

West Ham have contributed more to England than Spurs say (and I say that as a spurs fan) but were much higher up on the list because we’ve always had a decent amount of England players in our squad.

Oh god I totally agree.

I think this forum is a great example of why VAR exists & why it’s shit.

Most people on here only watch their team on the TV, probably didn’t play. Consume football through online, mostly.

As a result there is this fucking hysteria around decisions and an obsession with there not being any errors.

It’s seen as like some deep rooted injustice now if a decision doesn’t go your way. Previously that was just sort of accepted & people move on. Now we have Reddit and twitter so people don’t move on, they post it and show angles and argue about it.

Before, you just went to the game or watched it on TV and that was kind of your consumption of that game over with.

I don’t know why people are so quick to ignore the actual football. Like Newcastle Arsenal. Tight game, but Newcastle were better than Arsenal. Yeah gooners didn’t get bailed out by the referee, but the fact is they still weren’t as good and that’s why they lost. - but all of that becomes irrelevant because there is some controversy to obsess over.

Had Arsenal just played well & won we wouldn’t have a fucking club statement, Arteta acting like he’s Malcom X & gooners fabricating illuminati level conspiracy theory bullshit as those Mike Dean is this puppet master over all pundits.

Maybe we should get rid of referees entirely. Just have a virtual ref, whose whistle is blown via a noise in the ground?

I think the argument is, you need to just let the referee, referee the game.

Yeah you didn’t get a man sent off from an off the ball incident, not the end of the world. These things happen in football.

Get to fuck

I think anyone with any level of football knowledge would rather their team have Neymar than Ronaldo though.

If we want to see improvements in refereeing standards, we need to improve the culture and working environment.

Firstly the principles of a no blame culture are a decent place to start. We need to acknowledge the possibility of error and support those who commit them to learn and grow from them.

Issue we’ve got his most football fans are thick as shit. They are the exact reason refereeing is so awful.

It’s very rare a team lose a game and the ref isn’t flagged as a key issue. Yet, it’s very rare at the end of the season the league table doesn’t feel meritocratic.

I’d love to see a shift in acknowledging a few things:

1. Human error is a part of the game and that includes referees. The standard they are held to is insane. Yes clear and obvious errors are a problem, but there is so much grey area that just doesn’t matter too much.

2. There isn’t corruption in the referees in England. There isn’t a conspiracy theory against your team. There is no wider plot. Just errors.

3. A culture of respect and appreciation for refs that’s extends to the managers and the players. The game can’t happen without them. Yes they sometimes have poor games, like a player does. It’s not deliberate.

4. Acknowledgment the game is rarely decided by the ref. You see it with things like a yellow card. Yes, maybe the yellow is harsh. It’s still the players fault if he then gets sent off. You rarely lose a game because your side didn’t get the one corner or whatever.

Basically, football fans, most of you on here fucking love to piss and moan about the referees. You love it. It means you don’t have to blame your shit team, or acknowledge the opposition was better than you.

If you want better, if you want improvement, maybe, just maybe move away from a culture than if a ref makes an error people threaten to kill him and accuse him of match fixing.

As, like in every other walk of life, abusing someone for an error doesn’t reduce errors.