|
Napoli president Aurelio De Laurentiis has rejected "accusations" by Italian Referees Association (AIA) president Marcello Nicchi regarding his Twitter outburst in relation to the officiating during Juventus' 3-1 win in Naples on Sunday. The discussion had been sparked with a series of tweets by the club's president in the immediate aftermath the defeat to Juve, with De Laurentiis claiming that referee Paolo Tagliavento and his assistants were "disingenuous or incompetent," calling for them to be suspended. Nicchi responded by stating the AIA would not be investigating the officials' performance, saying: "I don't want to censure anyone but in football, more often than not, one says what one thinks, without thinking about what one is saying." Those comments have been met with anger by De Laurentiis, who said in a statement released on the club's official website: "I wholly reject Nicchi's accusations against me... His statements are in total contrast with what has been clearly shown by TV images. "My tweets are simple, basic and totally not offensive, because they merely mirror reality -- which has since been shared and reiterated by most media. "In such a delicate match, the sheer size of the mistakes has been such that I felt the need to highlight them. I come from cinema, and I have been brought up [to believe] in democracy and freedom of expression. "Criticism is always constructive to improve the performances of all of us, including referees, who in their profession must absolutely be rigorously impartial. "By expressing my personal thoughts, I only wanted to highlight how inadequate the actual system is, and how desperately we need to urgently revise it, with instant replay for instance -- something that I have been advocating for many years, and that many other professional sports already use."
|
