Mikhail Chigorin wrote:kinkylola wrote:I think you say, If you gain an advantage from the handball, play is stopped. If you've intentionally done it, you get a card ... unintentional, but advantage gained, foul.
The trouble is though, this imposes a requirement upon the referee to either think or to even be allowed to 'interpret' the event in some way.
In the first instance, today's referees are solid from the neck upwards and don't have the capacity to think.
Because referees are biased dumbells, the rules should be set in simplistic concrete to never allow the slightest prospect of deviation from them.
I very much disagree with the first two statements above as far too simplistic, but agree with your third if only in theory, to simplify the game. The ever increasing complexity of rules such as offside, handball when mixed in with intent, advantage all exist to allow the game to flow wherever possible, and these evolutions of rules really require the referee to think very quickly on their feet to arrive at a decision based on how they have been trained to interpret the rules in given scenarios.
The current rules are a clear concession to promoting football to be entertaining as a spectacle, wheras a flat interpretation of handball as handball, or offside as offside would result in considerably more stoppages in games and a dumbing down of the product, which the FAPL can't allow for obvious commercial reasons.
Sometimes the referee's interpretation may be wrong in the eyes of the fans of one or both teams, or even just plain wrong on occasion. The fact that controversial decisions on handball and offside can be endlessly debated by fans of opposing teams or even amongst fans of the same team as happens on here with neither side of the argument apparently ever conclusively right, shows just how impossible a job the referees often have in keeping the fans happy - but I'd wager that more often than not when we reckon they are wrong, they are very probably correct - remember they are all assessed all the way through the leagues and only the highest scoring in the entire football pyramid stay on the premier league list.
The bias question of course is another matter entirely