Daniele Orsato: "Referees, no more wasting time. The aim is to speed up the game"

At the start of the season we made some mistakes, which shouldn't be made, and I expected even more. It's football and not the Play Station, there have been situations in which we made mistakes, see Rowe held back by Kalulu in Juve-Atalanta: in those cases the VAR would have helped." Daniele Orsato, head of the National Referees Commission for Serie A and Serie B, said this at the Trento Sports Festival.

"The reiteration of the mistake bothers me more than the mistake itself. When the referees do well it's their credit, but if they do badly it's my fault: it's important to take responsibility and this applies as much to me as it does to them. You have to know the game and the player. Read the games. Knowing that if a certain player catches the ball you have to run ahead or make a certain movement. And it also helps in the overall management of the race", Orsato said again.

"Enough wasting time. Fewer breaks, we need to play football and the new Ifab rules go in this direction. The goal is to speed up the game. We look at the actual weather and everything becomes more beautiful and spectacular. And you also train our teams to have an international dimension - he continued - To forge new referees it is above all necessary to "give trust" to the younger ones because "there is a competition between them to do well and I see the fire in their eyes. We are transforming the group into a team. I have to teach the younger referees to have courage. If you have experience you know how to apply the rules because over time you build up your shoulders to be able to whistle a penalty in the first or last minute".

"The referees must not be the protagonists of the show, on the contrary they must disappear, as Davide Massa did very well in Roma-Inter. The referee must do two things: run and whistle. In a match you run well over fifteen kilometres, the athletic aspect must be taken care of as much as possible because with a physical problem you cannot stay on the pitch. Knowing the rules is not enough, you have to know football: when in Paris Verratti got the ball, for example, I already knew that I would have to start running. The players don't accept decisions taken from eighty meters away", concluded Orsato.