James Lawton: Flap over refereeing diminishes Premier League

Mark Hughes takes to the bench for his first game as manager of Queen's Park Rangers (Getty Images)

It is no doubt reasonable to believe that, if Mark Hughes gets a little more than nominal financial support from the owners who cut the ground from beneath his predecessor Neil Warnock's feet, he should save Queen's Park Rangers.

Unfortunately, a couple of apparently unsolvable problems reappeared at the top of the Premier League agenda long before Hughes yesterday suffered his first debut defeat in a club managerial career distinguished, at the very least, by an impressive level of competence.

One concerned the unfathomable depths of mediocrity into which the League which claims to be the richest and most dynamic in the world game so often plunges. The other could hardly be more basic. It is the mushroom cloud of controversy which builds, routinely now, around something once known as the simple art of tackling.

The latest example – a late lunge by QPR's Shaun Derry, which earned him a yellow card and put Newcastle's gifted and frequently combative Yohan Cabaye out of the game – had consequences which you would like to think might just provoke the Football Association into something more resembling crisis mode. The fact Chris Foy, whose dismissal of Manchester City's Vincent Kompany led to the player's four-match suspension, was once again the presiding judge is guaranteed to increase the clamour.

Arguably the best solution so far is one offered at the weekend – by a member of the fourth estate, no less. The suggestion is that a Monday-morning video review should determine the appropriate disciplinary action, avoiding the current scandal of inconsistency in the punishments meted out.

Of course, the trouble with this is that it implies Mr Foy and his colleagues are not divinely inspired every time they reach into their pockets.

This could be a sticking point if you do indeed believe the only untouchable doctrine in football is the one that says the referee is always right.

For Newcastle, the consequences of Derry's action could have been a lot more severe. The arrival of Cabaye's replacement, Hatem Ben Arfa, for a while at least, sharply increased Newcastle's creative instincts after they had been all but obliterated by QPR's classic response to having someone new in the manager's office. Ben Arfa is the type of player who can drive a manager to distraction – brilliant one minute, cavalier the next – but there were moments when he was the game's nearest thing to redemption.

That inspirational role might have been the sole property of Demba Ba's replacement Leon Best, who lapsed into more or less total irrelevance after scoring a winner of sublime touch and judgement. The statistics told us this was Newcastle's only direct strike.

For the game, it was certainly its most engaging breath of life – and it was another reason to marvel a little later at the spirit and the football of Swansea City in their assault on Arsenal's declining role as the purveyors of English football's most beautiful football.

Newcastle have certainly this season made extraordinary progress from some of the worst of their futility but here, through the loss of two players, they were too often at a disturbing loss. For much of a deeply unsatisfactory match the best they could do was offer hope to a team fighting against the end of their brief life in what is supposed to be the big time of English football. The reality, if you did not happen to be in Swansea, was that it was one which has rarely looked quite so diminished.