The facts are not in dispute. If Woongarrah Wildcats scored from the tenth kick of a penalty shootout, they would be crowned champions. The ball hit the crossbar, bounced back and hit the diving goalkeeper, then went into the goal.

The referee erroneously ruled no goal, and the shootout continued until Umina were declared the winner.

This was wrong.

Everyone agrees that this was totally wrong.

However, the referee, whose decisions must be respected even when wrong according to FIFA, said it was right.

Game over.

Umina celebrated, as they had every right to do. They’d been declared the winners by the referee and, even if some of them knew the referee had made a mistake, how was this any different to the millions of other mistakes made by officials all the time that potentially change the destiny of a match, season, career?

A penalty not given…a penalty wrongly given…a ball crossing the line for a goal not given…a goal wrongly allowed or disallowed for offside…

These happen every game. We’re used to it and we get on with it.

However, Woongarrah, after consulting with the CEO of Central Coast Football, lodged an appeal. The consideration of their appeal was predicated on an incident report subsequently provided by the referee, and also some iPhone footage provided by fans.

The appeal was upheld by the association and Woongarrah were declared the winners.

I am not remotely suggesting that anyone has done anything wrong. In particular, no-one is blaming the referee. Mistakes happen and we all move on.

Whatever happened to overturn the result was done, I suspect, in the interests of a desire to be fair. The thing is, as far as I can see, notwithstanding the altruistic motivation of the association, the authority to overturn the result has to be questionable.

The Umina club appealed against the decision to overturn and the matter was referred to an independent arbiter who considered the three technical grounds of appeal and determined that, while there was much merit in Umina’s argument, none of the grounds of appeal were sufficient to upset the determination of Central Coast Football.