League ice hockey coaches disappointed with refereeing standards

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There is one thing that the rival coaches in Finland's elite hockey league, the SM-Liiga, are touchingly unanimous on this spring: the standard of refereeing has been a major disappointment.
      Shortcomings in the work of the men in black-and-white are cited by coaches from teams at both the top and the bottom of the league table.
     
The general sentiment is that interference and other offences are now slipping past the referees considerably more easily than in the previous season, and players are getting away with things that even a blind man ought to be able to spot.
      In the view of Risto Dufva, coach of league leaders JYP of Jyväskylä, the big issue is laziness: "It is much easier not to blow up for an offence than to stop the game."
      Dufva wants to see players given the chance to attack without being fended off with the stick. He says that last season things worked, "but this season has been a catastrophe".
     
Ismo Lehikoinen, coach of Helsinki club Jokerit, currently second in the table, points to the fact that fishing for penalties for infractions has become almost acceptable.
      When the opposing team gets steamed up at players' deliberately looking for penalties and their own players start throwing their weight around, things rapidly get out of hand.
     
Petri Matikainen of the Espoo Blues also feels that the referees' line has been slipping of late.
      "This season we have seen a lot of concussion cases and tackles straight into a player's back. The sort of things that don't belong in hockey should be weeded out more effectively. Otherwise you only get bad blood among the players and even between the coaches."
      Lehikoinen, whose team had a lengthy run in the European Champions Hockey League, argues that the refereeing seen there was a lot stronger, allowing room for players' skills on the puck to come out.
     
Kari Jalonen of Helsinki IFK shares the views, and hopes that the spring's matches and the play-offs will see an improvement and a more even standard of refereeing.
      Perhaps the strongest condemnation comes from Pori Ässät coach Alpo Suhonen, who has already earned a EUR 5,000 fine from the League for his comments.
      He charges that the standard has been clearly more uneven this year than last.
      "Referees need to go back to the school bench. The four-referee system has not been absorbed properly and some of the referees are very inexperienced. The biggest problem with an inexperienced ref is the lack of self-confidence, and that results in uneven decision-making", claims Suhonen.
     
The SM-Liiga is now entering the home stretch of the regular season, with most teams having played 50 of their 58 matches.
      JYP Jyväskylä lead with 91 points, and the six teams currently guaranteed a berth in the quarter-finals of the play-offs are JYP, Jokerit, KalPa from Kuopio, Espoo Blues, Oulu Kärpät, and HPK of Hämeenlinna.
      Four points separate HPK from Tampere Ilves, the seventh in the table, and they are followed by HIFK Helsinki, TPS of Turku, and Lahti Pelicans. Teams finishing in the places from 7-10 in the table will play-off for the two remaining places in the last eight.
     
At present it looks as if the season will end in early March for Rauma Lukko, Pori Ässät, Tappara of Tampere, and SaiPa from Lappeenranta, but the margins are small, with the possible exception of SaiPa, who are already seven points adrift of Tappara at the bottom of the pile.
     


Links:
  SM-Liiga (Wikipedia)

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