On saturday, a team prospered because of something that DIDN’T happen.

It’s a tough one to call and of course, we don’t want endless debate over whether a team should be gifting a goal back (to be honest, I think it’s getting to a ridiculous stage now when they kick the ball out of play as one of the opposition looks like he’s about to pass away after getting a scratch on his leg) but in this case, it was so extreme that it would have been, for me anyway, the right thing to do.

Funnily enough, if Reading had done so, fans would probably discussed it for a day and then it would have been forgotten.

As they didn’t, here we are 5 days on still on about it.

Mind you, that’s probably because we are both BillyNoMates!!

Players are on the field to play football and win a game, not to play God and take it upon themselves to ensure decisions are correctly made.

Of course we can squeeze other arguments in and debate professional fouls etc. but that should be another debate.

I can’t resist the England Argentina bait. Of course as an England fan I would be devastated. I remember the Hand of God incident and I would have been delighted if the goal had been discounted, but not by the Argentinian side scoring an own goal, but by FIFA using video evidence to not only disallow the goal but also to have sent off the culprit.

Justice would have been done, England would have been playing against ten men, the scoreline would be genuine (not adding another goal to make amends) and an Argentinian player would not have been responsible to his country for having to make an even bigger decision - scoring an own goal to even matters out.

But I think the thrust of this piece is that the officials error was so huge, so obvious and so wrong, that putting it right was the correct thing to do.

Strangely, I wonder if the fact that players are always trying to con the ref, claiming throw ins and goal kicks that patently aren’t theirs, diving, shirt pulling etc, was the reason that Stuart Atwell didn’t listen to the Watford protests on saturday.

And lets think of it like this…if it had been England v Argentina in the world cup finals and the ref had given the ‘phantom goal’ to the Argies, I doubt anyone would be of the opinion that ‘it’s all part of the game’ and that ‘ref’s make mistakes’. There’d be uproar.

Let’s face it, the ref’s make mistakes, and yes this was a monumental one, but most of the time they get it right and unless video evidence is used there will always be mistakes.