Dear Premier League players, managers and pundits, I’ve got a great suggestion for a New Year’s Resolution - stop moaning!

Win or lose, it seems hardly a match goes by without an immediate post-mortem and it’s almost always the fault of the match officials rather than poor skill or tactical ineptitude.

“I think when he looks at that on replay he will probably apologise,” has become a refrain of hard-done by managers these days as they highlight one decision of hundreds in a match that did not go the way they would have liked.

Middlesbrough manager Gareth Southgate laughed off the idea that his team should have had a penalty in their defeat at Old Trafford on Monday, saying, “You don’t get those things here,” while Harry Redknapp let fly this week with a tirade of abuse towards a referee who sent off one of his Tottenham players.

Arsenal striker Emmanuel Adebayor was sent off before Christmas for two bookings - virtually identical cases of clumsy tackling. Did manager Arsene Wenger berate his striker for failing to learn his lesson? No, he chose to label the refereeing “a joke” and complain about the fouls on his players that were not given.

Adebayor complained about how they kicked him first and got away with it, and then said that the clearly fair tackle by Xabi Alonso that led to Cesc Fabregas suffering a knee ligament injury was a foul.

When John Terry was sent off for his flying two-footed assault on Everton’s Leon Osman the Chelsea management were “so incensed” that they refused to speak to the media.

Manager Luiz Felipe Scolari, who began his time in England with an admirable refusal to criticise referees, eventually let loose about all the things he was not happy with in the match, though none of them were the failure of his multi-millionaire squad to muster more than a couple of shots on goal in a drab performance.

The media, particularly TV, have a lot to answer for in the development of this trend as almost every post-match interview tends to focus on “the key decision” of a penalty given or refused or a red card that should or should not have been shown.

Commentators too contribute to the problem. The BBC’s John Motson, who seems to have forgotten that he retired last season, seems to be developing a new catchphrase: “Was that handball?”, (pause, watch replay from new angle) “I think it was you know, and I think the United players have every right to be upset with referee Mike Riley.”

Dozens of cameras and computer graphics now help the studio experts “prove” that a player was an inch offside and that the linesman “got that one wrong” when they should instead be amazed at how often, at high speed and with the benefit of one instant glance, they get it right.

A few years ago the referees in Serie A got so sick of the criticism they demanded, without success, a one-week ban on all TV replays just to see how accurate the armchair second-guessers would be with the same one-off chance to see an incident that the man in the middle has.

It would be an interesting experiment to try in the Premier League, and might, for a few blessed hours, give us a break from the moaners.