Two football posts in two days. Great headline, lifted from one the red-tops, just about sums it up. Sex discrimination or plain ignorance, Gray is just a dinosaur ex-player (Rio is right – there’s a first) with a stock of punditry clichés, good riddance. Keys is a professional broadcaster, he should have the book thrown at him.
Their offence is incompetence and plain ignorance of the rules of the game and the jobs the officials do – for any women in sport or officials of either sex, it’s sure water off a duck’s back. Before the story broke, we were already laughing at the predictable on-screen comments that the decision was in the least doubtful, doubly funny that Massey did actually make an offside error a few minutes later, though not in a critical goalscoring opportunity, so no-one seems to have picked up on that. Errors are errors. In my experience women make better match officials, provided the have the basic command / authority, because on the whole they are more intuitively concerned with the point of the rules than their anal interpretation and application to the letter.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00y5m82/Special_1_TV_Series_2_Episode_12/
Sven is sacked for saying something “unacceptable” off camera. What is best about this is that in reality i doubt either of the half-wits actually knows the relevant rule as well as they ought to in their (former) professions.
Sadly, I can’t see the BBC 3 link here in Brisbane, but I get the idea. Yes, agreed, their failures had little to do with sexism – plain unprofessional ignorance and lack of respect.