Psst! The Ref's a Robot!

Willie Young
A robotic version of him on the way?

Apparently, the SFA has hatched a scheme to replace referees with robots. My mole from the SFA offices swears that SFA chief executive Gordon Smith left this top secret document lying around:

"Congratulations on your purchase of a model C-1800 XPR Automaton Referee Unit and welcome to the operator's manual. We strongly suggest that you familiarise yourself yourself with the information contained in this manual. We cannot be held responsible for damage or injury caused by incorrect operation of this Referee Unit, or for any strange behaviour caused by attempts to reprogram the unit. However, if you find your C-1800 XPR to be faulty, we will repair or replace it at no cost to you. Your statutory rights are not affected.

"This model is constructed from a lightweight but durable titanium alloy and is equipped with an extra loud referee's whistle, several spare sets of red and yellow cards, a highly polished cranial unit, ears which can detect a defender cursing under his breath 100 yards away and laser-beam eyes which enable the Referee Unit to spot a slightly mis-timed tackle from the other end of the park, although the unit will unfortunately tend not to detect a blatant sending-off offence committed right in front of it. The unit can also be adjusted to a number of pre-programmed settings, which include Inconsistent, Harsh, Picky, Extra Pedantic, Ultra Strict, Ultra Ultra Strict and Ann Robinson. This enables the unit to provide the correct performance for the game that it is controlling.

"Sometimes the unit may malfunction due to weather conditions, geographical location, or having to perform more simultaneous tasks than its central processing unit can handle. When this occurs, simply re-boot. If no improvement, boot again, hard, preferably on the posterior. Occasionally the referee's whistle will fail to function, red and/or yellow cards may be shown at inappropriate times or not at all at appropriate times. These are normal glitches in the unit's usually smooth functioning and should be ignored, although we acknowledge that this is difficult to do. UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES should anyone try to argue or reason with the Referee Unit, as this will invariably overload its circuits and cause a flurry of cards to be shown.

"Accessories available for the C-1800 XPR include more spare sets of red and yellow cards, spare whistles, stop-watches which can be set to tell the time differently from everyone else's watches, replacement heads for when the unit's head is panned in by a frustrated centre-forward, and a set of Linesmen Units, which compliment the Referee Unit perfectly in every way, right down to shirt colour and Crowd Abuse Tolerance (or lack of it).

"We hope that your C-1800 XPR will give you many hours of useful refereeing and that you will be pleased with its performance. However, please note that we cannot be held responsible for loss or damage caused by the frustration of players, managers and spectators due to the often inexplicable decisions made by the unit..."

Hmmm... Doesn't sound like too much of a change then...

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