How to avert the referee errors that could cost SC Villa league title

2026-03-19 - 11:14

The last one week could have ended SC Villa’s charge to an unprecedented eighteenth Uganda Premier League title. Although the Jogoos beat Entebbe UPPC 2-0 on Saturday, March 14, their failure to register their preferred results set them aback on their title ambitions. Their goalless draw against Express FC and the defeat at the hands of Police FC left Villa nine points behind table leaders Vipers SC in fourth. In the worst case scenario, the points difference between Villa and Vipers should have been six points. But two bad refereeing calls, yet, clearly avoidable, or even better still, reversible in a minute could have saved the game of its latest scandal. Tadeus Kitandwe, the former Vipers SC chairman, knows too well about a bad refereeing call, and the danger it poses to both players and a team. But at the same time, he is the one man, who, back in the 2017/18 season helped save a referee from upholding a wrong goal. It was a live game involving Mbarara City and Vipers SC on Azam TV at the Kakyeka stadium. During the final 15 minutes of the game, Vipers scored a goal, although the ball went through the net, stirring a fracas. The Mbarara players were saying that it was not a goal, yet those of Vipers were wheeling away in celebration. However, the referee was not sure about what call to make. But Kitandwe, who was the floor manager of the Azam TV production, had a small screen on which he viewed the replays of the game. The replay showed that the ball had entered the goal. But the goal net had not been fastened well into the ground, which allowed the ball to pass through. So, what Kitandwe decided to do, was to quickly show the fourth official the replay. The fourth official quickly alerted the centre referee based on what he had seen, hence enabling the man in the middle, who had hitherto not awarded Vipers a goal, to finally call it 1-0 to the visitors. Although what Kitandwe did to save Vipers then was not permitted in law, the club he was loyal to returned home bouncing with the full three points. These were legitimate points. How Villa would do with a Kitandwe when assistant referee Immaculate Ongiera wrongly ruled out Hassan Mubiru’s would-be winner against Express, or even Frank Ssebufu’s well executed finish against Police FC, that should have turned the resulting loss into a draw, at least. Ronnie Kalema, a Fufa Executive Committee member, is a former Fifa referee. In light of the recent refereeing mistakes against Villa, he argued that there should be an acceptance that football is a game of mistakes. “So, we should not condemn referees when they err, especially when it is not commonplace in our game. One or two mistakes do not make our referees horrible. Let us not forget that by and large, they have handled this season well,” Kalema said. That said, sport in the world has taken a huge step in trying to eliminate human error. This has also gone a long way in helping correct referees errors, Kitandwe argued. In fact, in some football circles here, there is a reasoning that like Kitandwe did eight years ago, when he helped the referee, why doesn’t Fufa do a pilot project, where live TV games have a replay intervention on clear and obvious referee mistakes? Like Kitandwe reasoned, it would not take more than a minute to tell that assistant referees Okudra and Ongiera made the wrong calls against Villa in the respective matches they were involved in. In fact, this would be better than banning a referee for what may be a genuine mistake, which affects their livelihood. Besides, in case a referee has been influenced to make a bad call, knowing that there is a TV review that can be referred to, perhaps that would push them to be more vigilant to avoid the embarrassment. Yet, there are those who insist that TV replays cannot apply in selected games. They insist for as long as not all games are on TV, then, many teams will still suffer from the lack of a “Kitandwe-like intervention”, which is unfair. Kalema seems to support the argument that unless there is the Video Assistant Referee (VAR) system in place, across the board, Fufa cannot pick and choose games where reviews are done. This, in Kalema’s thinking may appear biased against some teams. “Right now, VAR is simply unaffordable in our situation,” Kalema said. But Kitandwe said that refusing to review TV replays in case there is a bad call, just because it is not used in every game, is a lame excuse. He went on to say that even in Europe, you find that some lower divisions do not have VAR, just like certain grounds (stadia), while others do. According to Kitandwe, Uganda can use what it has even in the absence of the expensive VAR, and that is TV replays in the UPL, because oftentimes, they have been conclusive. If that were done, SC Villa would be in a more comfortable position on the league table.