WARSAW—The Ukrainian’s question was turning into a shrieking rant.
Up on the stage, the focus of that rage was nodding along to every raised beat like a grief counselor.
“Why? Can you tell me why? You have not explained why!” the Ukrainian yelled.
And since he is more accustomed to this sort of thing than just about any man alive, Pierluigi Collina continued to nod and smile.
Like a good counselor, UEFA’s chief refereeing officer has no answers. He’s here to help you talk out your frustrations, which are guaranteed to spin out forever.
Casting this man in this role is a stroke of … well, very high intelligence. We can’t credit UEFA for genius on any particular.
For starters, Collina may have the most famous face in world sport.
Before he was involuntarily retired as a referee at the age of 45 – as all on-field officials are—the bald, bug-eyed Italian emblemized competence and fairness in a profession generally assumed by fans and Ukrainian journalists to be staffed by mental defectives and the visually impaired.
That reputation was cemented during the 2006 Calciopoli fixing scandal. Phone intercepts had Italian crooks complaining bitterly about Collina’s perverse honesty.
He retired to a rich career as a product pitchman across Europe.
UEFA has leveraged that popularity, putting Collina in charge of all refereeing matters. The sole purpose of that appointment is so that Collina can be rolled out on days like Wednesday to explain away all the mistakes of his colleagues.
After that first explosive exchange, over the disallowed Ukrainian goal cleared from behind the English line on Tuesday night, Collina made a plea.
“If we start commenting on all decisions, maybe we stay here until Christmas,” he said, hands clasped and wagging before him.
Next question? About a certain decision taken by Portuguese referee Pedro Proenca.
And Collina kept smiling.
They lined up against him, each one representing national grievances large and small – the Greeks, the Poles, the Spanish and proxies for every other country. Where there was an error, Collina admitted it. He repeated the word “mistake” like a prayer. But they wanted more, some sort of penance he could not provide.
It was like watching the congregation heckling the Pope.
As the complaints grew fiercer, Collina tried to change the context of the conversation.
“I know you like numbers,” he said in breezy English.
According to UEFA, there have been 302 decisions in 24 games thus far taken by assistant referees involving offside calls where the distance between attacker and defender was less than one metre. These people are plainly well staffed.
“There have been 289 correct decisions,” Collina said, hitting the point he wanted to make. “And 13 wrong,” he said, hitting the only point everyone else in the room cared about.
If this numeracy was supposed to reassure anyone, it had the opposite effect. It goaded on the few who felt they’d landed on the wrong side of the statistical fence.
After the gaffe in Donetsk, they opened referees’ training here on Wednesday morning. A dozen of them stood at the goalmouth, while coaches pounded balls into the net to be saved at the goalline by more coaches working as ‘keepers. The results of this highly controlled quiz were videotaped and judged.
“I can tell you the feedback … is very positive,” Collina said.
A little to the west, FIFA boss Sepp Blatter was muddying the waters further, by demanding goalline technology now. One suspects this isn’t about doing what’s right, but about unsettling the man who will succeed him, UEFA boss Michel Platini. Like Linda Hamilton in The Terminator, Platini is an implacable foe of all machines.
But that’s politics and this is reality. Back in the wailing room, the accusations continued to roll in – the uncalled foul in this game and the underserved yellow in that one. Collina grew tired of the baiting.
“If you would like to experience something very particular, take a flag in your hands and go out on the field,” Collina chided one persistent interrogator. “It could be a nice experience for you.”
It might be particular, but it wouldn’t be nice, which is his point.
What can never be said out loud by people with any power is that human error is a contamination introduced into this experiment to produce more dramatic results.
No one is turned on by certainty. You don’t get up to watch the sun rise. You wait for an eclipse.
Collina tried to make this point in a roundabout way – casting the errors of referees as fundamental to life, the product of “human mistakes.” He said that several times.
“We are talking about the sun and moon – two different things,” Collina said gnomically, while the grumblers grumbled.
There will be more officiating blunders as we get closer to the end. Despite all those pointless training exercises and the import of the games, they will probably be worse than the ones we’ve already seen.
As only Collina and his employers seem to understand, that’s a large part of why you watch in the first place.
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