The human error

Los Angeles, 29th of January, the LA Lakers are hosting the Boston Celtics in the first rivals week of the NBA. The NBA introduced a week of games between the biggest rivalries known to the competition. This week concluded with a game between the two teams who’ve won the most championships in NBA history. Although the Celtics are contenders for the title this year, the Lakers are struggling to get in to the play-offs. Looking to find some form and start winning games the Los Angeles outfit brought were giving it their all and a great game ensued. It went to the wire, with 4.1 seconds on the clock it was a tied game. LA calls a time-out and draws up a play to win it with the minimal seconds on the clock. The inbound pass goes directly to Lebron James almost at halfcourt, with minimal seconds James drives to the paint. Three Celtics are waiting for him whilst one is trailing behind, he finds a margin to split his defenders and goes for a layup. A man of his caliber, almost beating the all-time scoring record, has been in this position before many times and has accomplished to win these games more times than he hasn’t. His team needs every win it can get to qualify for a chance to fight for his fifth championship, he isn’t going to lose this game. However, he has been fouled and misses his layup. No matter, he goes to take free throws and makes at least one of them to win the game, right. Right?

Wrong, the referees miss the call and the Lakers lose in overtime. The californian based team is furious, but it only has an apology to show for it.

Lebron James can’t believe the foul wasn’t called
Credit: Instagaram of @paulrutherford_

A bad call in sports is something none of us want to see, yet it’s almost unescapable when you’re watching sports. With modern technology developing every day trying to mitigate the problem of unfair or bad refereeing. Think of the addition to VAR to football, the hawkeye system to Tennis or reviews during NBA games after a challenge. How much technology will progress there’s just no catching up to human error and even if it were to catch up, is that something we want?

We can look at Arsenal v. Brentford where the VAR forgot to draw the line for offside. Or the infamous title decider in Abu Dhabi for F1 world championship where due to a misunderstanding of the rules the race director made an error in how to proceed during the safety car, changing the winner of the championship from Lewis Hamilton to Max Verstappen. I can go on and on about bad calls from referees in all different sports. Since we started playing sports there has been the issue of bad officiating. Yet everytime it happens we act like it has never happened before or it has never been this egrigious. At the end of the day, over a season it will most likely level out. Sometimes the call is in your favor and sometimes it’s against you. And for all the times we complain about referees, we don’t commend them enough when they led a game without mistakes.

Max Verstappen overtaking Lewis Hamilton after late drama in Abu Dhabi.
Credit: F!, Joe Portlock via Getty Images

Don’t think that I’m perfect either. When I’m watchting my favourite team I also get heated when I feel like my team is being disadvantaged by a referee. I can remember three instances immediately where I feel like Feyenoord has been hard done by a referee (Feyenoord-AS Roma led by Clément Turpin in 2015, Feyenoord-AC Wolfsberger led by Srđan Jovanović in 2021 and any game led by Dennis Higler). However it is easy to forget that without these people we wouldn’t even have these amazing games to watch, let’s accept that these mistakes as part of the game. I dread the day we have no nuance in the games we watch where the officiating has no gray area and can’t be led in the spirit of the game, therefore losing some iconic matches in history. Never to be repeated ever again. Just remember the next time the referee screws your favourite team/athlete, that we’re all susceptible to human error.