RateTheRef

Good listen!

Glad to hear that Mike Dean hopes to carry on for at least one more season after this one. He noted that age slows you down and he struggles with Saturday-Tuesday-Saturday-Tuesday now but experience helps him to still control games without running all over the place.

Interesting to say that a year or so ago he wasn't convinced by VAR but now sees its advantages.

This so informative. I'm finding this so interesting.

I agree with the above and it feels like slowly it's improving. There was some stuff with Mike Dean about his 500th game last month and the referee section of the Premier League website has started to have a bit more input on decisions from Chris Foy. I think Bobby Madley's use of twitter/blogging has also helped show the human side of refereeing, even though there were obviously specific circumstances leading to that.

I think much more needs to be done though and it has to be followed up. The Gary Neville and Jamie Carragher documentary a few years ago was great but that was in 2017 and we've not really had anything since.

All a bit trivial but quite revealing none the less.  Anything thst can get across that referees are actually human can do nothing but good.