Graham Poll was refereeing an evening game at Everton. When he arrived at Goodison, long before kick-off, he headed straight out onto the pitch; part of his pre-match ritual was always to take an early look at the playing surface and re-familiarise himself with the layout of the stands, the tunnel, the dug-outs and so-on.
Some youngish lads were hanging about in seats near the mouth of the tunnel. They had autograph books and asked for his signature. Bemused, he signed each proffered book, making a joke about it being rare that anyone wanted a ref’s autograph.
The Guardian’s Dominic Fifield either saw the scene or was told about it and, in his following morning’s report, wrote:
“Poll’s apparent desire to be the centre of attention – he was signing autographs prior to kick-off – is unhelpful when he attempts to officiate.”
On talkSPORT radio, Alan Brazil told listeners that the autographs incident showed that Poll loved himself. Callers to Brazil’s show agreed. One said: “He’s Mr Big Time Charlie, Mr Superstar who loves the attention”.
A few days later, Patrick Collins said: “Poll loves being in the media”. Collins said that on a TV show, yet without any apparent irony or self-awareness.
Now imagine a different scenario. Suppose Poll had declined to sign the lads’ autograph books.
In those circumstances, I would have expected Fifield, Brazil, the phone-in caller and Collins to condemn Poll for being arrogant, Mr Billy Big Boots, too self-important to spare a minute for young football reporters.
Despite what you probably believe, the last thing Poll ever wanted was controversy or media attention. He armed himself with a brusqueness of manner as a way of pretending not to be affected by spending his entire working life being abused. But actually, he was and is thoroughly kind, generous and decent person.
I collaborated with him on his autobiography. It was launched at a bookshop in Tring and, during the evening, I saw his smashing mum surreptitiously wiping away a tear. I asked her what was wrong. She said: “I’ve never been with Graham in a crowd when people have been nice to him”.
I doubt you care about that.
Like Fifield, Collins and Brazil, most journalists, broadcasters and fans have made up their minds about referees – and so look at their actions through the distorting prism of unfair preconceptions. Managers have the same jaundiced attitude. So do players, chairmen, armchair fans — hell, it’s everyone who isn’t actually a ref.
Comments which start: “I know it’s a hard job but …” are like those that begin: “I’m not a racist but …”. A perniciously prejudiced remark always follows. The most common critique is the cliché: “He was the worst ref I’ve seen this season/ever”.
The truth, though, is that our top refs are extraordinarily good.
They should be, mind you, because the Premier League have thrown a fortune at refereeing.
A team of sports scientists, psychologists, physiotherapists, sprint coaches and dieticians works with the refs. Each official has an individually-tailored fitness regime — and there’s no skiving off because they train wearing monitors recording their daily work-outs.
They need that fitness. On average, a ref runs 12 miles every game — alternating jogs with stamina-sapping sprints. And a ref makes a decision every 30 seconds: do I run there or there?, do I respond to that shout by that player?, can I see my assistant from this position? They are not all critical decisions, by any means, but it all makes refereeing mentally exhausting as well as physically demanding.
Then there are the big calls: when the referee blows his whistle (or decides not to) for what might or might not be an offence. Every single one of those decisions in every single match is reviewed in the following days using Pro-Zone — a software package that allows the ref (and his appraiser) to look at incidents from many angles and which generates detailed statistics about how the ref went about his job.
Imagine a similar analysis of you in your job.
So if all this time, effort and money is being lavished on making refs better, why are so many of you convinced they’re nearly all rubbish?
There are two aspects of psychology at play. One is that, as fans, we are so frustrated when a decision doesn’t go our team’s way that we become increasingly infuriated with the official responsible. The other is that we instinctively accept a decision that goes our way as being just the correct thing to do. There is no mental tick in the credit column.
So when, for instance, Norwich fans thought about Robert Jones’s handling of the game in that town in Suffolk, there was a heap of criticism and scant praise — yet the single biggest call of the game was to book Jordan Graham for diving rather than award a penalty.
“Yeah, but what about the studs in the face for Grant Hanley? What about all the fouls he missed?”
But, of course, Ipswich fans believe he missed terrible fouls by our players. “How did Jordan Rhodes apparently hurt his face when he had his back to a defender and was striking that player with his elbow?”
That’s how football works. Fans of every club in the land believe they’ve had a rough deal from refs. It’s because passion is involved, and passion swamps reason.
If you go to games in which you have no passion for either team, you’ll hear both sets of fans complaining that they are hard-done-by and you will probably think — entirely dispassionately for once — that the ref did OK, on the whole.
It’s worth considering how referees came to exist. In the earliest days of Association Football, the captains decided whether there had been a foul, etc. That idea didn’t work (quel surprise!) and so each club was asked to provide a non-playing arbiter to stand together on the sideline and share the decisions. Again, it won’t be much of a surprise to learn that they couldn’t always agree. So a third person, a complete neutral, was added. The chaps on the side-line referred to him when disputes occurred.
The non-partisan third party to whom they referred became known, in time, as the referee.
Fast forward to 2018. The players are all cheating — routinely claiming they’ve been fouled when they haven’t, brazenly protesting their innocence when they know they’ve sinned, lying about every other throw-in, slyly grabbing shirts or shorts, deliberately pressurising officials with a chorus of complaints.
Most of the spectators, pundits and participants don’t really know the laws of football. And some managers — the Warnocks and Mourinhos — denigrate referees with such predictable regularity that people laugh at them. Yet most of the folk scoffing at those managers have their own hair-trigger cynicism towards officials.
There’s an arrogance involved in all this carping at refs. It is an attitude that says: “All the experts, all over the world, who have worked so long to improve refereeing, and all the people involved in refereeing now, they’re all incompetent because the refs I see are rubbish”.
It couldn’t be something that’s going on in your head instead, could it?
Meanwhile, the referees themselves are still what they were all those years ago — neutral third parties: arbiters, with no axe to grind, striving to the best of their ability, to make fair judgements.
They make mistakes. Of course. But generally, they make fewer than anyone else on the pitch.
So when I mentor teenaged girls and boys who are just starting out as referees, I tell them that they only need to be able to do one thing. They must be able to say to themselves: “Despite all that was shouted by parents, despite the incredible difficulty of judging some of the incidents — despite everything — I did my utmost to respond honestly to what I believed I had seen at the time.”
It’s such a crying shame so many people have already made up their minds about them.
Amazing – a MFW piece where Mick isn’t patronisingly defending his mates (and the incompetent board) Delia and Michael!
What a pathetic response to a fine article about refereeing.
Michael Bailey will love this article ??? nicely written though Mick ?
A lot of good sense and fair observation in there, Mick. An interesting test is the one you mention: watching a game (especially in person rather than on TV) in which you don’t have an allegiance to one side or the other.
My “I know it’s a hard job but…” is this. It’s an incredibly difficult job, made more so by the pace of today’s game and the constant cheating of players. VAR isn’t yet as slick as it will be, but the World Cup showed its potential to ensure the key decisions are right and justice is done. It would have already corrected some understandable but important mistakes in the Premier League this year (eg Wolves’ handball goal against Man City).
I understand the reservations about VAR, including that it can only be used at certain levels of the game. But in my view they’re far outweighed by its advantages – not least helping refs with their job.
I believe I have seen some really poor refereeing performances but I don’t believe I have ever seen a corrupt one.
I enjoy the biased post match debates about decisions and the fact that 5 people can watch an incident and see entirely different things. I think VAR will spoil the fabric of the game, it spoilt the World Cup for me.
I qualified as a referee in 1986, refereed about 6 games and decided I was terrible at it so I quit (playing against players on Sundays that I refereed on Saturday could be risky too). I get annoyed when pundits, players and managers say things like ‘for me, that’s not a foul’. I wish they would take a ref’s course-it would make their opinion more valid and probably help with their blood pressure!
It’s all relative of course, it was bizzarre to listen to the Radio Norfolk commentary praising the referee on the Ip5w1ch game then read the tweet from Michael Bailey lambasting the performance. I personally thought him excellent. Opinions hey!
Thirty years ago I reffed three or four u-12 games for my mate Nick who was head teacher at a primary school in Loughton, Essex, His early evening matchtime job was to deal with his little team and his regular ref was off school duty with sickness of some kind so we flouted the rules and I stepped in.
Dog’s abuse from parents? You wouldn’t believe it. Loads of little Johnnies backed by vocally aggressive parents from both sides. The more abuse I got the more Nick laughed. Until the C-word was used and he asked the offender to leave.
Referees, in general, deserve more respect. It is not a job I could do.
I can’t disagree with anything that Mick has said. The issue of controversial refereeing decisions will continue while there is a lack of accountability. There are no post match interviews. Not even with a fourth official or officials who watch referees. Why aren’t referee reports published? I agree the cause isn’t helped my managers, but fans will always complain of injustices until the referees themselves justify the decisons they have made and occasionally admit that they got a decision wrong.
Can you seriously imagine though what a post-match interview would sound like? Indeed, were you a ref, would you be willing to be recorded answering hostile questions knowing you’d have more chance of being treated fairly in a kangaroo court?
The interviewer would only be interested in what he or she perceived was a wrong decision. A player scores a worldie and the press are all over him, but nobody’s going to interview a ref to compliment him on a good performance are they?
Let’s face it sometimes all a referee could say was “My view was partly blocked, I only had one angle and it happened in a flash, so I based my decision on what I could actually see and didn’t try to guess, so I’m happy with what I did in those circumstances.” Just imagine the press reaction to that
“Arrogant ref stands by howler” wouldn’t be the half of it.
A lot of the ire directed towards referees is because they often don’t enforce the rules of the game. How often do you see a goalkeeper following a free kick given out on the touchline move the ball 10 yards in-field, so that he can kick it more centrally? Players routinely stand over the ball to prevent a quick free kick being taken – a few years ago, football adopted the rugby rule of moving the free kick forward 10 yards if a player did this – has that rule been dropped, or is it just ignored? Another favourite is goal keepers holding the ball for excessive times – I’ve timed this at up to 20 seconds, but referees take no action.
All these little niggles add up over the course of the game, and colour our judgement of the referee, even though he may get the majority of the major decisions right?
I think this is a key point. There are 3 questions about referee decisions. 1 Did the ref see the incident properly (VAR helps here), 2 Did the ref interpret the rules correctly (this would be noted by the assessor) 3 Is the framework that the ref works in appropriate to the spirit of the game (as stated in the above comment). I think if we can use all we can to reduce errors by points 1 and 2 then the final point has to be how do we want the rules applied and what consequences do we want. Over strict application will never work so certain rules are not applied at times, this is clearly agreed at high level as we do not see that much variation between refs in any one season but interpretation clearly changes more than rules do.
Let me respond to Peter Moll’s point about refs not explaining themselves and not being accountable.
If a ref faced the media immediately after a game, it would be a bear pit. Reporters, most of whom don’t know the laws, would tear into the ref in search of a quick headline.
Believe me, I know, because for a long time that would have been my job.
But the EPL have a system in place whereby a former top ref is available on Sat nights (or whenever pertinent) to discuss and explain decisions.
And refs are most definitely held to account. In this column I explain that every single decision is scrutinised in detail by the ref and his personal mentor. Bad mistakes are highlighted in those seasons and details passed up to the select group ‘supremo’ Mike Riley.
Twice a month the select group refs gather for a training session at which all the controversial incidents are discussed by all of them and Riley uses the big mistakes as learning points for everyone.
A ref who has made a bad mistake will not get such good, big games until he’s shown a consistent improvement. In really bad cases, refs are suspended and/or dropped down the divisions.
But these actions are not generally publicised because it would just lead to more abuse for the ref concerned.
And, as perhaps I should have said in the column, the amount of abuse recognisable refs — and their families — get in the street and while out in the evening is appalling.
But above all, Peter, you need to remember the refs are just people going about their work honestly and with a very high level of competence.
What annoys me about match officials is when a ball is played through for one of our players and he can’t get to it, as he’s being held by an opponent – the assistant referee rarely seems to ‘see’ the offence.
I think, as others have pointed out, the issues do not always originate from the referee, but manifests itself there.
Mick, you say the refs know the rules better than the players. Perhaps. But that’s like saying if you read the highway code you know the “rules of the road”.
You’re not allowed to pull shirts. I know this, the ref knows this, the fans know this, and the players know this. How frequently do you see a penalty for shirt pulling vs. how frequently do you think a ref or an assistant sees it?
All officiating eyes staring at the box. You think it’s awarded 1%, 5%, 10%, 100% of the time they see it? If not 100%, then why? They didn’t know to, or they didn’t want to?
These offences occur because the players know the ref won’t apply the rules.
Same goes for standing over the ball, swearing, the ‘six second’ rule, coming off the line during a penalty. etc…
Either the rules are wrong, the refs are wrong, or the instructions to the officials are wrong. I don’ t know which, but what I do know is that the rules are very selectively applied. That’s a big problem to a fan wondering why their attacker was bundled to the floor for the fifth time and the ref continues to ignore it.
And it’s not the fan that’s wrong.
This may be hard to believe, Dave – but I agree with you.
That was my point, Dave – the selective application of the laws of the game. If the laws aren’t going to be applied, why have them? The “six second” ( or is it seven?) is a case in point, and so is standing over a free kick. Simple to apply, a booking for one offence, a red card for the second, and managers will make sure they follow the rules thereafter.
And as mentioned elsewhere, reporters and players may not know the rules as well as the referees, but that also applies to TV commentators and pundits, too. That spreads disinformation to watching fans, which doesn’t help the situation.
A great article Mick; thank you very much.
However, nothing will ever be able to explain to me how both Simon Hooper (remember him??), and the recently excellent at Norwich Lee Mason, are now both on the Premier league list……or is it just my interpretation?? (We did manage to lose both games so it can’t be NCFC bias………)
O T B C
John: the Simon Hooper/Cameron Jerome incident occurred in the Premier League, and I believe Hooper was demoted for some time from the PL list because of it. It’s an example of the kind of accountability Mick described.
I used to ref. It makes you hate footballers.
I also used to referee – originally as an “official” ref on the NW Norfolk circuit, and latterly as a “Club home ref” and then as a kids ref
I do watch the refs performance when I go to games – what you have to remember is that whilst crowds are generally looking down on the action, the ref is at pitch level and pro players especially are very subtle. As to never giving pens for shirt pulling I can remember a 2-2 draw against Bradford the year they were promoted to the Prem and we got a pen for a shirt pull that the crowd missed and Iwan didnt even claim for from memory. However the defender was stupid enough to not hide it from the refs view and we got a point that in the end could have promoted the binners (but thankfully didnt)
Refs dont get replays unless VAR is being used and have (usually) less than a second to decide
a) Has an offence been committed
b) Which side committed it (quite often what refs call 9/5 confrontations – ie CF v Centre Half – are both sides committing a foul)
c) Whether it should be a free kick, whether the side offended against could gain an advantage from continuing play, and often whether the offence took place in the area or outside it
Linesmen can help, but they only control a quarter of the pitch – the ref (running a general diagonal path) controls the other half of each half. And pro players can be very good at hiding their actions from the nearest official (ie a tug on the shirt is done on the linesmans blind side if they are on that side of the pitch, usually with the ref looking through a crowd of players). Refs cant ball watch either – they have to be aware of EVERYTHING that is going on, both from keeping an eye on action off the ball, and to avoid running into players that may be sprinting the other way
The debate here has been interesting.
I don’t think I said, as has been claimed, that I claimed refs know the rules more than players.
I assert more than that: most spectators, players, coaches, broadcasters, writers, pundits, tweeters, Facebook posters and folk up the pub are grievously wrong in what they believe the Laws Of The Game (pedant’s note: they’re not ‘rules’).
A case in point was whether a West Brom player was offside when they scored one of their goals against us.
The interpretation of ‘offside’ was changed in 2005, but for the next decade Alan Hansen was blithely declaring on Match of the Day that: ‘Nobody understands it now’. He was being paid more than £1m a year but couldn’t be arsed to learn the Law and broadcast with knowledge.
The offside Law was rewritten before the start of the 2016-17 season to include the 11-year-old interpretation change. Yet the debate about the West Brom goal completely ignored the precise and clear wording and repeated old myths.
It’s infuriating, frankly.
On refs ‘not applying the rules (Laws)’, there’s an offence being committed somewhere in the ref’s vision every other minute, and, like policing, football officiating has to be selective.
There are two oft-repeated and completely contradictory complaints: “We want consistency” and “Why don’t refs show common sense and a bit of flexibility?”.
But the overall answer to all the points raised in these interesting (but very familiar) comments here — about Simon Hooper for instance — is that what fans perceive as mistakes are just the honest but humanly flawed judgements of highly trained and minutely scrutinised decent people. Until and unless the game is refereed by a computerised drone, there will always be decisions that infuriate.
It’s not a systemic failure of one or more people. It’s not a Machiavellian plot against NCFC. It’s just football.