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How culpable are the referees?

Anisur Rahman
Refereeing decisions often lead to controversies in football everywhere in the world, but it is perhaps more severe in Bangladesh than many other places as big clubs often raise their fingers against match officials during and after crucial encounters.
Things often get out of hand as referees and their assistants often get assaulted by club officials and players during matches. Such an incident occurred during the final of the Federation Cup, and the Bangladesh Football Federation (BFF) came strongly on the clubs, handing suspensions and fines to key players. It has happened before and the end result of such incidents is that the clubs often lose their way in the title race due to such punishments.
But how culpable are the referees in such cases and do the referees face any punishment for their mistakes be it intentional or unintentional?
The reality is there is a system of handing sanction on the referees even though, according to FIFA guidelines, there is no option of making public the sanctions handed over to referees or assistant referees for their poor performance or mistakes that they make.
The referees' committee of the game’s local governing body works silently on a regular basis to rectify the mistakes of the referees and hand them sanctions if they are found culpable of making major mistakes.
So far four referees have been suspended from conducting three to six matches due to their mistakes in three matches - Federation Cup encounter between Abahani and Arambagh KS, Independence Cup encounters between Abahani and Saif SC and between Sheikh Russel KC and Brothers Union.
"Whenever we get any allegation in written form or in verbal, we analyse match videos and scrutinise report of match commissioner, who plays the role of referee-assessor. We first try to understand whether the decision that made was intentional or unintentional. If it is a minor mistake, we warn the referee and give him tips for
improvement. If the incident is big, then we take actions according to the book," informed BFF's Referees' Committee secretary Ibrahim Nesar.
In a bid to improving the standard of refereeing, the BFF is conducting 17 programmes such as seminars, fitness tests, referees' course and weekly tests round the year and it is holding refreshers' course prior to the start of season with two to three instructors updating the referees about the changes of the laws of the game.
"We generally form a panel of 40 referees who conduct all the matches in a season. The referees for a specific match are appointed the day before the match but they don't know their role prior to the start of the match," said BFF's head of Competition Management System Shahidul Islam Limon.
Limon further informed that they have 3000-plus referees including five FIFA referees and seven FIFA assistant referees working under them. Each of the referees that come from outside the capital is paid nearly Tk 8000 as per match fee, conveyance and daily allowance for conducting each topflight match.