The Case Against Video Referees

Earlier today, long before all the arguments about Lampards goal and Tevez's off side there was the Valencia Grand Prix. Now even by Formula 1's particular standards the Valencia Grand Prix is always painfully dull and this year was no expection.

The most interesting thing to happen was Mark Webbers spectacular crash that had most people who saw it writing his obituary in their heads. Although Webber survived uninjured the accident brought out the safety car which is designed to slow down the race cars while the marshalls are on track dealing with the accident. As always happens when a safety car appears it totally changes the rhythm and therefore strategy of the race. On this occasion the big loser was Ferrari's Fernando Alonso because he just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Unfortunately Alonso was so incensed by this that he immediately got his team to complain to the four stewards, who are F1's referees, about a number of things.

Firstly he complained that Mclaren's Lewis Hamilton has over taken the safety car. This forced the stewards to review the incident from a dozen different angles in super slow motion. After spending 10 minutes doing this they determined that Hamiliton had indeed passed the safety car line ahead of the safety car which is technically a breach of the rules. So although the video also showed that at the time Hamilton could not see where the safety car was and that the safety car had not actually left the pit lane the stewards had no choice other to impose a drive through penalty on Hamilton. As Hamilton was so far ahead of the third place car this penalty had no effect whatsoever other then to increase the gap between Hamilton and Vettel, the race leader, to such an extent that any prospect of an actual race was instantly ended.

Once Alonso realised that forcing the stewards to give Hamilton this penalty did nothing to improve his finishing position he then proceeded to lodge complaints with stewards about the six cars that finished ahead of him. I think he complained that 4 of them were going too fast under the safety car and 2 of them were going too slowly. As this was just an attempt to use any technicality to cover up the fact that Alonso had a bad race these complaints were all eventually thrown out by the stewards hours after the race had ended.

Anyway the point of this long and slightly rambling post is that today I have seen one sporting event totally ruined by a bad refereeing decision and I have seen another sporting event ruined by a sore loser trying every opportunity to get a refereeing decision overturned to win an advantage. Given the choice I'd take the bad refereeing decision everytime.