New IFAB cards leave us feeling blue

Hands up, any of you football fans out there – do the names Maxwell Scherrer, Mercy Akinde, Kay Cossington, Lydia Williams or Jillian Ellis mean anything to you? No?

At least many of us have heard of former Italian referee Pierluigi Collina, ex-Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger and retired Nigerian International forward Daniel Amokachi.

They happen to be members of the technical panel informing the decisions of the International Football Advisory Board (IFAB).

IFAB is the organisation which dreams up and, once its friends at FIFA gives the thumbs-up, imposes all the law-changes and new ‘guidelines’ which referees, managers, coaches, players and we spectators have to get our heads round.

I won’t list the qualifications of the first list of people. Just because they’re not widely known doesn’t mean that they haven’t had careers of varying achievement in the game and, anyway, that’s not the point.

The point is that, as football reels from one controversial new law-change to another – and the imminent introduction of ‘blue cards’ is just the latest example – the silence from the above characters is deafening.

In fairness, we have heard the odd peep out of Collina and Wenger. But generally speaking, the new laws are announced more or less as a ‘fait accompli’ and everyone is supposed to get on with it.

While we’re at this business of the dearth of accountability at the top of the game, have any of you heard of Noel Mooney, Ian Maxwell or Patrick Nelson?

You may possibly have seen Mark Bullingham on your TV screens once or twice. He’s the chief executive of the (England) Football Association.

The other three are his opposite numbers at Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, and they form half the eight-strong IFA Board itself.

It all goes back to the 19th Century, when we invented and ran the game and everyone else did what we told them.

Nowadays, FIFA supplies the other four members of the board.

The votes of six of the eight are needed to pass any law change, but that means at least two of the England/Wales/Scotland/NI group have to vote ‘Yes’ before it goes ahead.

In other words, we still have a hell of a say.

Those are the people who have been chopping, changing and fiddling with the laws of football, at an ever increasing pace, over the last few years.

New offside, handball, tackling, time-wasting, dissent, treatment of injuries and, of course, VAR – they’re all down to the ladies and gentlemen above.

You’d think that, if there was one group of ‘sufferers’ who might pipe up and say ‘Enough’ or even ‘No’, it would be the referees.

But again, there’s seldom a dissenting word from their direction. Why not?

VAR, which the majority of fans say has failed in its primary objective to ‘improve’ the game, has become such a financial and logistical gravy-train that the top-flight now looks lumbered with it.

We still hear even experienced managers and coaches saying that they don’t understand offside (active or passive) and handball decisions any more.

Now the poor refs, as if they haven’t already got powers to deal with the situations, will need an extra pocket for their blue cards, to avoid shuffling like dealers in a casino.

Most of the laws of the game still have that wise and time-honoured phrase attached – ‘in the opinion of the referee’. Yet IFAB and FIFA continue to undermine it at every turn.

As far as we know, all of the officials listed above do want the best for the game.

But once you give anyone a title, a seat round a well-polished table and an appropriately generous expense account, the pressure to justify it all becomes overpowering.

Maybe, just maybe, we’ll hear one day that those IFAB members met, had a chat, looked at each other – and then went home.

Hopefully sooner than later...