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When the Premier League resumes this weekend, don’t be surprised to see your favourite team being slapped with more penalties than in previous seasons. It’s not a conspiracy against your team. It’s a new policy that has been conveyed to Premier League referees by the Professional Game Match Officials (PGMO): to be strict with players grabbing and impeding attackers in the box during set-pieces.
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“The feedback that we had (from players themselves) was that there’s just a few too many examples of players clearly pulling people back impacting their ability to move to the ball or some clear extreme actions are not being penalised. They’re the ones I expect us to catch. Therefore I would expect this time next year for there to have been a few more penalties given for holding offences than what we’ve seen this year,” Howard Webb, the chief referee officer for the Premier League, was quoted as saying by The Guardian.
He tried to assuage fan fears about excessive penalties being awarded by adding: “But it won’t be a huge swing of the pendulum.”
How will referees decide on penalties now?
As per the Guardian report, referees will consider a few criteria before deciding on awarding a penalty: the length of time a player is held for; the extent of the impact on their ability to move; the nature of the opponent’s efforts to impede movement; and whether the opponent is using both arms in holding.
Webb also said that the holding rule was not a short-term test balloon that would be put in place for a few months and then forgotten.
“This is not meant to be a six-week campaign, August and September, then we forget all about it. If we went in like a steam train and gave every little bit of sort of contact then it would tell you it would be a six-week campaign. Because we would get told very quickly to ease off from what we’re doing. We have to take the game with us and we have to be credible. We have to identify those situations that do fall in line with the feedback that we had,” Webb said.
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