Well, obviously we need to talk about that Myles Lewis‑Skelly red card. Shall we have another look at it? Right there, you can see the point at which Michael Oliver’s ego makes contact with his anti-Arsenal bias. If you roll the tape forward a few seconds, you can see a clear movement of content creator towards webcam. But actually, if you look at it from the next angle, you could argue that under the current interpretation of technocratic surveillance capitalism creeping across many late-democratic western societies, it’s actually six of one and half a dozen of the other, Jeff.
Occasionally, and usually by accident, I will find myself in a conversation about referees. I can never keep up with them. Largely this is because most football fans have an uncannily encyclopaedic recall of every referee who has ever slighted them: their name, their home town, the full rap sheet, the exact look on their face when they waved away an appeal for a stonewall penalty at the Hawthorns in 2016. “Yeah, Darren Bond’s always had it in for us,” someone will say, and I can only nod dumbly.
