Speaking from the Aula Magna of Coverciano for the end-of-season press conference of the refereeing class, Gianluca Rocchihead of CAN, touched among the various topics on the incidents of racism that occurred during the recently concluded Serie A championship: “It was one of the things to pay attention to, we had a case, that of Mike Maignan in Udine in which Fabio Maresca was very good. And yes, also Francesco Acerbi with Juan Jesus but I’m talking about relationships between the public and the players. This means that the public first of all behaved better and that, if stimulated, people give answers on the topic. We would like to have zero cases, not one, but we can all give ourselves a round of applause as a football system.” Rocchi also talks about the great new ‘Open VAR’, the DAZN format where the audio of the VAR-referee conversations were offered: “For me it was a very, very tiring job, I say this sincerely. We had to reinvent a job that is not ours: I guarantee you that going in front of a TV is not exactly easy. It had a great advantage, it forced us to work even harder on communication. An effort that we asked for and to which we had excellent responses: the audio communications are clean and as they are, we haven’t cut half of them. As an experience it was very beautiful and allowed the referees to understand how we work, outside of our world. The goal is to have a championship that is as fair as possible. Of the five macro-objectives we have set ourselves, one has not been achieved and we are far away. The others are either reached or in the process of being reached.”
The former international referee then revealed that he had complimented his team: “We blew the whistle a little more, but I told the boys that they did very well because in the last few days there has been a drastic reduction in playing time also We haven’t had any major problems regarding penalties, if we exclude the Juventus-Bologna episode with the penalty awarded Dan Ndoye not booed. The VAR interventions were fewer than last year but we can do better, there were days with 9 interventions and it’s not a good message. My goal is to send guys onto the pitch who referee without using VAR or in any case more parsimoniously. As a media we have grown and this does not make me happy. It’s up to us to set the bar straight again. They have to decide on the pitch, the VAR parachute is not for the referees, but for the teams and the fans. The referee must think about not making mistakes, otherwise he is not a referee. We have repaired 92% of the errors, but I wonder how you managed to put up with so many errors…”. Then Rocchi makes a very specific reference: “I’m thinking of Inter-Verona”, or the match of the alleged foul by Alessandro Bastoni on Thomas Henry in the winning goal for the Nerazzurri in full injury time: “It was an important episode due to a lack of VAR intervention but perhaps 15 years ago it would have been a single episode in the field, without the specific weight that there is today. We are not always happy with confirmations after reviews from the field, it would mean that the VAR was missing something in its decision-making process.”
