VARCICAL! Who'd have thought? VAR has made our incompetent officials even more incompetent
October 28, 2019
No-one can ever say that being a football referee is a cushy job, they have to run approximately 8 miles per match and more, if extra time is involved. Also football referees at any level need to have a really thick skin to tolerate the torrent of abuse by fans at matches, in the mainstream media and on social media. However being a referee can be very lucrative. Premier League referees are paid a retainer of £40,000 per year plus £1,150 per Premier League match and £7000 per Champions League match on top of that. So a top Premier League official could quite easily earn £100,000 plus per year and for that amount of money, you'd expect a referee would be somewhat competent at his job.
Unfortunately, for the last few years Premier League referees and their assistants have been performing abysmally. Their ridiculous decisions in matches have cost football managers their jobs, cost football clubs millions of pounds and cost punters a small fortune. In any other walk of life, employees performing as incompetently as these officials have been performing game after game, week after week, would be sacked. Yet incredibly, what do these officials receive for their incompetence? They receive all expenses paid trips around Europe to show the rest of the continent just how incompetent they are when officiating at Champions League and Europa League fixtures. At least FIFA realised the incompetence of our referees, and for the first time in 80 years there were no British referees officiating at the 2018 World Cup in Russia.
This season VAR (Video Assistant Referee) was introduced to alleviate the incompetence of our officials by helping them to make the correct decisions at crucial moments in matches. Despite VAR having all the tools available such as multiple angles at which to view any incident and instant and ultra slow motion replays, the VAR officials are still making appalling decisions. To be fair, VAR has overturned some ridiculous offside decisions made by linesmen (that's what they are, they should NOT be called assistant referees) in a timely manner, but VAR has also taken an eternity to eventually arrive at the WRONG decisions regarding some offside and penalty kick incidents. Now that VAR is in place, the actual referees and their linesmen officiating at matches are not to blame for these ludicrous decisions. They cannot be expected to see EVERY single incident that takes place during a match. It is the job of the official who is operating the VAR to help the match officials make the right call when there is an important decision to be made but the VAR officials seem to be watching a different game to which the match referees are officiating in.
So until we can have competent officials operating VAR, we may as well scrap it now and go back to the usual incompetence by football officials that we are used to.
One redeeming factor regarding our incompetent officials is that there are far worse referees in most of the leagues around Europe.
Just saying...
Campaign for Men Only Checkouts at Supermarkets.
September 21, 2014
When most men go to the supermarket, they kind of know what they want before they enter, they go in, get their stuff, pay for it and leave. This is the reason I am campaigning for a new law stating that all supermarkets must have at least one ‘Men Only’ checkout.
The reason for this campaign needs to be addressed urgently and I will give my reasons why. I am not saying that any of the following is true of all women, indeed some of the following has probably happened to quite a few women themselves and they are more than likely to get just as annoyed as I do. Usually I have one of these issues every time I go to the supermarket, sometimes two in the same visit but how unlucky can one person be to have all of these issues happen on the one visit to a supermarket?
One day last week I was out and about and remembered that I needed some milk and a bag of rice. I went along to the supermarket thinking that I couldn’t be there too long with what I had to buy. I found what I needed pretty quickly but as per usual bought a load of other junk that I didn’t really need and headed to the dreaded checkout. As I’ve experienced trouble before, I never use those self-service checkouts, I always get error messages stating “Please place item in bagging area,” so you put said item in bagging area only to be told “Unexpected item in bagging area” etc. What do these machines call ‘Unexpected’? I’ve just scanned a bag of rice then placed it in the bagging area only to be told “Unexpected item in bagging area”, just what did the machine expect me to place there? A guitar? So you look for an assistant and if you can actually find one, they come and reset the machine whereby you scan your next item and the whole process starts over again. It’s a nightmare. So I have to join a checkout queue and as I have never had any luck in choosing the quickest queue to join, I thought I would try some new tactics.
So there I was hiding behind a pillar surveying the checkouts in much the same way as a pride of lions stalking a herd of wildebeest. There were seven checkouts open and I quickly narrowed them down to a choice of three, then down to one and proceeded to join the queue. Although my queue was not the shortest I chose this queue because the people in front of me had fewer items in their baskets or trollies than the customers at the other queues. In fact the only person, who had any amount of shopping at all in my queue, was the woman directly in front of me. She had a trolley that was stacked with so much food, the trolley was taller than her and I swear, what was in the trolley could have fed me for at least six months. I am usually a good judge of people and although she had a mountain of stuff in her trolley I judged that she looked quite sensible and wouldn’t be too slow at getting through the checkout. As soon as I had joined my queue, I looked around and took note of what position I would have been in the other two queues had I joined one of them instead (admit it, you all do it too). After a few minutes there was only one customer (who was nearly finished) and the woman with the enormous trolley of food in front of me. I looked at the other two queues I could’ve joined and they had hardly moved at all. I felt like breaking into a song and dance routine, I was so pleased that for once in my entire life, maybe at long last, I had chosen the correct queue. I didn’t, (I’m so unlucky when choosing queues. There was one instance where I was in a queue and had been queueing for five to ten minutes going nowhere fast, when out of the corner of my eye I noticed another checkout about five checkouts down from me was just about to open, I quickly left the queue I was in and headed over there. Unfortunately half the supermarket had also noticed this and by the time I got to that queue there were more people in front of me there than there was in the queue I had just left) so I wasn’t getting overly confident just yet. The woman in front of me started putting her stuff on the conveyor belt which surprisingly, for quite a big supermarket was not very long. I’m guessing it was only about six feet long, mind you, with all the food in this woman’s trolley, she’d have needed a conveyor belt half a mile long to get all her stuff on to it. The woman in front of her had gone and I’m next in line, I look around at the other two queues again and I’m miles in front of where I would have been had I chosen any of those queues. I’m smiling to myself, finally thinking my luck had changed. Big mistake. As I said the conveyor belt wasn’t very long and as this woman was piling her stuff on to it, the cashier was scanning the items and pushing them down the slip-off area at the other end. This woman did not think to stop piling her stuff on to the conveyor belt and go down the other end and start packing some of her stuff. Even when you could see that the poor cashier was struggling to reach over the till, trying to balance the mountain of stuff that was being chucked at her into neat piles to stop it falling over the sides, this woman kept ploughing her stuff onto the conveyor belt. Finally, she had no more stuff to cram on to the belt and went down the other end to start packing. The cashier started to give her a hand packing but was told quite abruptly and rather rudely that rice does not go in the same bag as apples. Rice goes in the same bag as pasta; apples go in the same bag as fruit: potatoes go in the same bag as vegetables etc. etc. This woman was giving the poor cashier such a hard time that I was stunned and amazed at how anyone could be so cruel to someone who was only trying to help. Finally she had all her stuff packed into bags and then jammed all these bags back into the trolley. I immediately thought to myself: seeing as this woman was such a finicky person, why didn’t she just chuck all the stuff back into the trolley, grab 100 bags, wheel the trolley to her car and pack all her stuff there. At least it would have saved me waiting another 15 minutes. Still, all she had to do now was to pay and go and that shouldn’t take too long. Wrong. She then handed over around twenty vouchers/coupons which is no big deal as I’ve used them myself now and again. The cashier scanned these vouchers/coupons and the majority of them went through first time, a couple went through after the cashier had manually entered whatever number she had to enter but there was a couple that just wouldn’t work. No matter how many times the cashier manually entered whatever number she had to enter, they just wouldn’t work. Rather than give up on these coupons and try them the next time she came shopping, the woman insisted that the coupons were valid and she wanted to use them there and then. A supervisor was called for and by this time I was slowly losing the will to live and was truly glad that this particular supermarket didn’t sell rope as I would probably have gotten some and quite happily topped myself. Five minutes later the supervisor appeared and no matter how hard he tried, the coupons wouldn’t work for him either. With the woman still determined to use these two coupons, the supervisor somehow managed to lay these coupons off against some of the items she had bought and after a saving of a further 35 pence the woman seemed content. Now all she has to do is pay, surely that wouldn’t take too long? Wrong again. She decided to pay with cash which really shouldn’t be a problem should it? This is where I need a woman, any woman to explain to me, the logic of how some women pay for goods. I have seen this happen on numerous occasions and still have no idea why this happens. This woman’s bill was £144.93, why did she insist on handing over £161.28 which included emptying her purse of every single piece of smash that was in there. I mean why would she take all that time to count it all out, then the cashier has to count it all out too, only to get some smash back as change. Why do women do that? At this time I was praying that this woman would be out and about later on and find herself desperately in need of the toilet. The only toilet available for miles is one of those pay toilets and she can’t use it because she doesn’t have enough change. Anyway after all that nonsense she left the checkout and went on her merry way, I spent around two minutes at the checkout when it was my turn but it felt like I had been there for hours.
That is not the only reason for my campaign. What is it with certain women and supermarkets? Some women don’t go to the supermarket to shop for groceries, they go there for a day out, and in fact I’m pretty sure some of them would rather go to the supermarket than go to the pub. They block the aisles with their trollies chatting away about all kinds of nonsense to someone they have just met and if you dare to ask if you can get past, they tut-tut you then give you such a disgusting look that you’d think that you’d just asked them “how much for an all-nighter”. Some women need to be told that a supermarket is not a crèche where you can allow your crazy kids to run amok like raving lunatics, nor is it a suitable venue to hold the annual Women’s Guild meeting. I would be willing to bet good money that there are some women who walk into the supermarket at 10am and walk out at 3.30pm and all they have to show for all that time is a pint of milk.
Am I just being cranky again or should I get my campaign rolling?
Just saying...
Why I Need a New Phone
September 8, 2014
A few years ago I must’ve been one of only two people in the UK who didn’t have a mobile phone, always vowing to never get one. However, without my knowledge a good friend of mine went out, bought me a cheap phone and set up an account for me with a well-known provider. It was a basic enough phone for me, did what it was supposed to do but it only had ONE ring tone and what a really bad ring tone it was. It was like some cheesy disco dancing tune from the 70’s, it was that bad that if someone called me when I was in the pub, I wouldn’t answer because I was so embarrassed and didn’t want people to see that it was my phone that was ringing. I soon got onto the provider, upgraded to a Blackberry and since then, whenever my contract is up I’ve always gotten a new Blackberry.
Just over a year ago when my latest contract was up, I got a shiny new Blackberry, a new contract and an absolutely brilliant tariff with the same provider. This time I chose a touch screen as they seemed to be all the rage. Up to a couple of months it had been working great, then it started acting strange, but lately it’s taken on a mind of its own. It’s as if it has a personnel vendetta against me.
Just over a week ago I had my 1st appointment with my new doctor at a new surgery. I got off the bus, walked through the sliding doors, noticed a big TV with the volume off, a table full of books and magazines and a familiar sounding tune playing in the background. I grabbed a Rafael Nadal biography and started flicking through it. I quickly realised that it was a little known Stevie Ray Vaughan tune that was playing in the background. At this time there were another two people in the waiting room along with me. The next tune to start playing was an Eric Clapton & Freddie King tune that lasts for eight minutes and I’m sitting there thinking to myself, this is one cool waiting room. I’m still flicking through this book when the next tune starts playing and it was only my favourite Buddy Guy tune ever. I’m really getting into this song, knowing for sure now that this is the best waiting room of any surgery on the planet when I realise I’ve been in here waiting quite a while. I quickly work out the timings of the tunes that have been playing, go into my pocket to get my phone out to see what the time is and suddenly see that it was my phone that was playing these great tunes. I panicked, quickly turned the phone off and looked embarrassingly around at the 4 or 5 people that were now there waiting along with me. They all just ignored me as if nothing untoward had happened at all, which I found rather strange because I don’t have the best hearing in the world, and the volume of what I though was the background music was certainly loud enough for me so it must have been a hell of a lot louder for them. Maybe they all had worse hearing than me but I WAS really embarrassed about the whole thing.
Today I had to go to Ealing, the bus was packed and I was squashed between a big guy and a young girl. I mean this guy was massive; he was wearing shorts and one of those tiny vests. His legs were like tree trunks and his arms, shoulders and neck had muscles on top of muscles. He could easily have made a little more room for the rest of us but I wasn’t going to ask him. He looked like a proper geezer. I did what I had to do and a couple of hours later I was heading back to the Broadway to get the bus home. While walking there, my phone beeped letting me know I had a text message. I looked at the phone and there was a message saying that my device was full and I had to delete some content to free up space. I closed the message, noticed the text was from a friend of mine, thought I’d go sit in the park, have a smoke, sort this phone out and reply to my friend’s text while I waited for the next bus home as it was such a lovely day.
On checking my phone I found 22 videos, all taken today, all ranging from between 6 and 74 seconds long and all 22 thumbnails of the videos were pitch black. I was racking my brains wondering where these videos came from, then realised that when I had been squashed up between the young girl and the mountain gorilla, my phone must have been taking videos of the inside of my trousers pocket. I deleted them all, texted my friend back, had a smoke than got the bus home.
On arriving home I noticed the base of my landline flashing which means I have a new message. I found this kind of weird because I’m pretty sure no-one knows my new landline number, geez I don’t even know it off by heart myself. That’s why I keep it, along with my mobile number under ‘Me’ in my contacts list on my mobile. I pressed the button on the machine to be informed I have 17 new messages. I play message number 1 and all I can hear is traffic in the background and some heavy breathing. Message number 2 is the same except I hear people talking in the background but the same heavy breathing. I then check the phone itself but as it’s pretty new I can’t work out how to see which number called me last so I dial 1471 and the last number to call me was ‘Unknown Number’. I then check the remaining 15 messages and find that 14 of them were basically the same as the first two messages, all with differing background noises but all with the same heavy breathing. The last message was from some eejit trying to flog me car insurance and I don’t even drive. I deleted all the messages and made a cup of tea. I then remember I have to call back someone who had called me on Friday, I go to my mobile, touch ‘calls’ to find the number and find out that my mobile had made 16 calls to my landline today. I was gutted. For a few minutes I thought some old perv was after me only to realise that it was me who was the perv all along. This is why I believe my phone has a vendetta against me: To do all the things I’ve just mentioned the phone would have to have been touched against the exact icons in sequence without touching another icon while doing so. The odds against that happening must be astronomical?
To play the music at the doctors the phone must’ve been touched in this exact order:- (Music Folder – Blues – Play All – Shuffle), to take the videos of the inside of my pocket it would have to have been:- (Camera – Video – Record) that actually sounds as though it could happen easily but why did it choose Video rather than just take a load of pics of my pocket? To call my landline:- (Phone – Contacts – Me – Home) and when or why did it decide to stop making videos of my pocket after my meeting with gorilla man and start calling my landline? It’s a vendetta and that’s why I need a new phone and it won’t be a touch screen. To anyone that knows me, if you’ve had a call and it’s my number that’s showing and it’s some old perv breathing heavy down the line: it was the phone calling, not me and you now know the reason why.
Just saying...
Women & Oyster
September 6, 2014
This is completely true!
For those of you not in the know, you can't pay cash anymore on London buses. You have to pay with an Oyster Card or a Contactless Payment card. Anyway...
The other morning I was heading to the bus stop to catch the bus to go to the supermarket. I was about 150 yards from the stop when I saw the bus approaching and as there was no way I was going to catch it, I sauntered along knowing that I’d just have to wait for the next one. However, I noticed a woman running to try and catch it but unfortunately she missed it too. I’m not going to go into too much detail about this woman, suffice to say she was probably in her late 20’s. When I got to the stop, she was already sitting on the bench and I said “good morning” to her and commented on how unlucky she had been to miss the bus. She completely blanked me as if I wasn’t even there, which was fair enough and I didn’t give it another thought apart from smiling to myself and feeling somewhat happy that she’d missed the bus.
The next bus arrived about 12 minutes later by which time another 3 people had joined the queue at the bus stop. This woman got on the bus and then proceeded to search for her Oyster card or whatever other card she was going to pay her fare with. She had a handbag and some other kind of bag with her and judging by the commotion that was going on, I’m pretty sure she had some other kind of bags inside of these bags too. After about a minute the driver told her to stand aside and look for her card while the rest of us got on the bus, all of us having to reach around this woman with our cards to touch the card reader.
As we sat down, the bus driver could have driven off while this woman was still searching for her method of payment but he didn’t. He decided to wait until she had paid her fare; perhaps he assumed she might be a fare dodger. The driver even asked her to get off the bus and wait for the next one by which time she may have found her card. She was having none of it; she was determined to find her card. There were bags everywhere and after at least another 10 minutes she produced her Oyster card and touched the card reader with it. She didn’t produce it from any of the 17 bags that were on the floor by this time, she produced it from her coat pocket. She then proceeded to gather up these 17 bags and somehow get them all inside the TWO bags she had originally boarded the bus with. Then, without a care in the world and without the slightest bit of embarrassment, strolled up the aisle of the bus and sat down in the same seat next to me. I could tell by the look of and the growling of most of the other passengers that I was not the only person who was not this woman’s biggest fan.
I was absolutely fuming because in the space of 25 minutes, I had gone from being in a really good mood when this woman had missed the bus (after she had blanked me) to being really, really annoyed that she had missed that bus. I didn’t even care how selfish I was being at the thought of the poor passengers on the previous bus having to put up with this woman’s nonsense had she managed to catch that bus. At that particular moment in time, I didn’t even want to be in the same country as this woman, much less being on the same bus and even worse, the same seat. After a few minutes I realised that she wasn’t worth getting upset about and started to calm down.
Then it hit me.
This woman was at the bus stop before me. This woman waited at least 12 minutes for the bus. I know this because I was with her at the bus stop. This woman could and should have had her Oyster card ready when the bus arrived. Why didn’t this woman have her Oyster card ready? Why did this woman search through 17 bags of junk when her Oyster card was in her coat pocket? How on earth did this woman manage to cram 17 bags of junk into TWO bags? Why didn’t this woman run faster? Why didn’t the first bus driver wait for this woman? Why didn’t…Luckily for one of us, the bus arrived at the supermarket and I got off. Maybe I’m just getting cranky in my old age?
Just saying...
