Glasgow Clan head coach Zack Fitzgerald admits he is frustrated by the inconsistencies in refereeing in the EIHL, but he refuses to blame his team’s losses on any bad decisions.
The Clan had been on an excellent run of form in recent times, which saw them shoot to the top of the league. However, a disappointing weekend, which saw them fall to defeats to both Guildford Flames and Belfast Giants has seen them drop down the league.
Against Guildford on Saturday, it looked like the Clan had opened the scoring early on but the referee disallowed the goal for an infringement. However, Fitzgerald saw things differently.
“We had a goal disallowed within the first five minutes or so and watching the video now, it was a goal, 100 percent,” said Fitzgerald.
“I don’t understand why the referee said it wasn’t and that didn’t help things. It was called a no goal so it had to stay that way. That’s tough when that happens.”
Ultimately, the Clan were defeated 3-1 on the night and while Fitzgerald is quick to point out that human error is inevitable, he would like to see improvements.
“At times, there are inconsistencies, for sure,” he said.
“There are some things that I may disagree with but we are all working together to make a quality product on the ice.
“We’ve had times where we’ve probably disagreed with decisions but there will have been times when we’ve probably benefitted too.
“I don’t want to say too much though because I don’t want to get myself into trouble.
“It can be frustrating at times, for sure. But to be fair, it’s a fast moving game and things happen very quickly. These things are human error.
“I know football has VAR but I wouldn’t like to see that come in in ice hockey, what I’d like to see is our goal-line technology improve because at the moment, it’s really bad angles and it’s very hard to see - it’s not good enough.
“There’s always going to be mistakes made by managers, players, referees, everyone and I’m not going to say that no one makes mistakes. It is what it is and it’s great hockey league so we’ve got to just try to improve every aspect of it.”
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