[Devongone]

A couple of new rules might help:-

Appealing for a foul, a penalty, an award of any kind, or for an opposition player to be punished in some way will result in a direct free kick to the opposition.

Appealing for a foul or a penalty will always negate it being awarded. Play will be stopped and will be continued with a free kick to the side appealed against.

I think that would improve the standard of refereeing 100%, because it would ensure an improvement in player behaviour.

Furthermore any Media pundit who comments on a player who has deliberately committed foul to benefit his team and been punished as "having taken one for the team" will be sacked immediately or that station will lose its right to broadcast games.

[Dancingwilldoit]

Applying the current rules would help for starters.
Warn the players before the game starts - no verbal warnings, bad foul and its a yellow. Dont go swarming around the ref , thats a yellow also. Go down like a sack of potatoes without a tough tackle that;s cheating and that's a yellow. Any elbow up at face height - yellow.
Can you just imagine that? All of them in the rule book so no excuses.

[Devongone]

My only problem with that would be that it would remain very much a refereed game and the ref would remain very much the centre of attention. I think the game should be about playing it and watching it. And I think we should be making the ref's life easier, so people not only want to take refereeing up in the professional game, but also in their local public parks.

I agree actually applying current laws assiduously would seem the obvious first choice, but being the cynic I am, my answer is they don't and won't, because they probably can't. The game is too far gone. Players are too far gone. The media is too sold on questioning the ref'. And the fans have to interpret every result in terms of decisions made and not made, they're too perfectly trained.

I just think that the introduction of rules to ensure that if a player appeals by voice or gesture a free kick will always be awarded against him and his team, even if he's appealing for the most blatant penalty in the history of the game, would introduce such a level of good behaviour into the game that it would very quickly become natural.

We are currently heading down a road on which the ref' has to be super fit, has to be up with and anticipating play every moment, has to be criticised in public, is expected to explain his every pronouncement and can be denounced as a cheat the moment he makes the slightest error. A man of 50 who has learnt his job, become astute and is respected, has to retire because he can no longer achieve the iron-man fitness required to satisfy the desire across the game to whine and complain, because, however good and trustworthy he is, he can no longer be guaranteed to be within 10 yards of every incident. So ..... eventually either every incident will have to be replayed on some kinda mobile to decide what happened, because a human ref' is no longer able to satisfy moaning us, OR we decide to accept that football is ONLY a game, we aren't being deliberately and consistently cheated, and that the man with the slightly too skinny legs is doing his best.

Reality in the future is going to be only whatever was captured on some headset device. We aren't going to live life, we are only going to record it. We're all turning into those brat children at a birthday party who burst into tears because they see someone else with a slightly bigger piece of cake than them. We are making a brat game to reflect a brat society, when the whole point of sport is to show human beings at their best and most heroic.

[SaltergateBorn]

I`m all for introducing any new rules and/or system of refereeing that makes the game cleaner, fairer and more watchable and, yes, makes the referees` job easier. Unfortunately, just introducing such things isn`t enough; they also have to be consistently applied and persevered with in the face of the inevitable reactionary response from the media and the self- appointed 'experts', namely the TV pundits. The current furore over VAR is a classic example. Nearly every 'expert' seems to be jumping on the bandwagon to decry it and ridicule it when, to me, it makes perfect sense to use whatever technology is available to get the right decision. Ok, it`s far from perfect as yet, but it will be refined and improved over time.

I can remember when the rule was brought in that prevented `keepers picking up the ball from a back-pass and the frenzy that the likes of Alan Hansen - who was, of course, a defender - went into; it was rubbish, nonsense, should be scrapped, etc etc etc. Now it`s accepted as part of the game and has, I think most people would agree, improved the game by reducing at least slightly a team`s capacity for time-wasting.

I was just as enthusiastic when the regulation was supposedly brought in a few years ago to the effect that any back-chat to the referee would be penalised by a free-kick and that any free-kick already awarded would be moved forward 10 metres; it`s a system that`s proved very effective in both codes of rugby for some years now. I was really looking forward to watching games without having to see players surrounding the referee, trying to get other players booked and dismissed and the like. I was sadly disappointed. It was scrapped after a couple of years 'because it wasn`t effective' according to the authorities. It wasn`t effective for the simple reason that it wasn`t enforced! If it had been, there would undoubtedly have been absolute mayhem for a couple of months, but eventually it would have been accepted as part of the game, just as the back-pass rule has. We all know that in general footballers (and I include coaches, pundits etc) aren`t the most intelligent primates on the planet, but the message would have got through eventually.

My personal pet gripe these days is the time intentionally wasted by teams feigning injury, dragging out substitutions, delaying goal-kicks etc. when they`re winning so as to run down the clock. 'Game management' is the preferred euphemism in some quarters I believe, but to me it`s just another way of cheating. I read somewhere recently that one of the footballing authorities (I think it was UEFA) is suggesting reducing the duration of a game to 60 minutes, which has been calculated to be about the length of time the ball is actually in play in the average game, but stopping the clock every time the ball goes out of play or play has to be stopped. That would make time-wasting a hell of a lot more difficult and personally I would love to see it tried out. I doubt whether it ever will be though.

Myself, I`ve always been fascinated by the NFL system of having multiple referees on the pitch; one head ref (umpire) and a number of assistants. I agree with you, Dev, that the speed of the modern game makes it almost impossible for anybody with less than Superman powers to keep up with it all the time; a similar system in football would seem to be worth a try. Mind you, linesmen are technically 'assistant referees' now anyway apparently and should already be doing this. I wish somebody had told the 'assistant referees' about this on Saturday; I didn`t see a lot of assisting going on.

There are flaws in the way football is played these days - some of them quite serious flaws - that all of us who love the game would desperately like to see remedied. The thought of football returning to its original Corinthian values and becoming just a game again is a lovely idea, but unfortunately it`s just not going to happen. It has too much global commercial power and there is way, way too much money to be made out of it by too many people. Not gonna happen, I`m afraid.

[Devongone]

And you hit the nail on the head SGB - commercial values and Corinthian values are pretty much opposites. I would simply say that a one-word definition of commercial values would be cheating. Sport should be there to make the world better, not to be deformed by world's worst exigencies.

Unfortunately I think the no back pass rule was a monster failure. It created every annoying way used now to waste time and gave us this whole pathetic language of game-management to cope with. Time-wasting is unsportsmanlike behaviour. If players are indulging in it, the captains should be called together and warned that next time a free-kick will be awarded to the opposition (which I think remains in the rules for unsportsmanlike behaviour). The no-back-pass rule has turned keepers into outfield players who even at high levels of the professional game lack goalkeeping skills I, as an amateur, regarded as routine. Keepers are bigger, faster and more athletic than ever before, yet you are hard-pressed to find one you'd class as reliable ......... but almost all of them know how to do a Cruyff-turn. And we still get loads of back passes hoofed clear by the keeper.

The only reasons not to scrap VAR is that the technology can work and games are recorded anyway. At the top level it is inevitable that it will become like Hawkeye in tennis. But do I think that is a good thing? NO! It brings out the worst in all of us, makes us mean-spirited, mardy and bad, bad losers.

But you see I used to walk when I was out at cricket, whether or not the umpire had raised or was ever going to raise his pinkie. No one does that now. Is the game better for it? It's populated by cheats and mard-arses who, when their back is to the wall in the game, their first instinct is to surrender.