It’s a thankless task. It’s tough work, but someone has to do it. It’s a hard knock life. It’s a lose-lose situation. And here’s why we don’t care.
As much as it grates the mind hearing football managers referee-blame their way through post-match press conferences, as much as it scrapes the soul to see insipid millionaires try and deflect deserved blame onto other less handsomely paid – and, often, less handsome – people… well, referees are just the worst, aren’t they?
All the cliches are true; it is a thankless task, not to mention one with an acutely high degree of difficulty. Imagine if every computer programmer, or kitchen hand, or bricklayer was forced to carry out their duties in front of writhing crowd of livid, possibly intoxicated, people, swaying and baying as a clammy mob, all of whom are furiously partizan and all of whom hate your guts.
There’d be very few successfully programmed computers, a mountain of dirty dishes and some very dodgy walls out there. On top of the insufferable workplace atmosphere, the everyday tasks referees are required to perform are, by most standards, almost impossible. “Ok, Mark, I’d like you, a non-athlete, to keep up with Alexis Sanchez as he sprints as fast as he can down the pitch, and, at the same time, keep an eye on any minuscule amounts of toe-to-toe contact that may or may not occur, as multiple grown men slide with reckless abandon within centimetres of each other, ta. Oh, and there may also be some off-the-ball incidents you might like to keep track of. Thanks!”
But it’s all part of the job, right? This is what they signed up for, what all of their senses have been trained to do, at the elite level. The sight of Phil Dowd – when he was “active” as a referee – chugging merrily, like someone’s granddad racing the children at a picnic, after a Manchester United counter attack didn’t inspire pity, or sympathy; it inspired a full-blooded sense of “get off the pies and onto the treadmill, Phil!”
Before Arsenal’s match with Everton on Saturday, Mark Clattenburg was seen chatting jovially with Toffees captain Phil Jagielka. Of all the referees in circulation in the Premier League, Clattenburg is probably the most ostentatious, with his gelled hair and slightly prancy gait.
He is, though, in the opinion of this writer, one of the best, or, at least, the one with the most conviction. A referees job is as much to control, subtly, the temperature of a match, as it is to rule on basic decisions. Commanding officials can hold a heated derby back, apply a cool hand to its feverish brow, as it teeters on the edge of the pit of chaos. It’s something that can’t really be taught; perhaps only vast experience, coupled with some innate arrogance or stillness, can give a man this sort of presence.
But, really, it’s the little things that irritate the most. Like, for example, grappling at corner kicks. Now, most of these incidents are finely-weighted scales with six on one side and half a dozen on the other, but there does seem to be some sort of unwritten rule that leans in favour of the defenders.
Watch this footage from Leicester’s match against Crystal Palace this weekend. Now, as Scott Dann was tenderly disrobing Robert Huth, what exactly was referee Mike Jones looking at? It can’t have been the corner taker, who had the touchline official breathing sensually down his nape.
It can’t have been the more vertically-challenged players hanging around the halfway line, like the unpicked children at a schoolyard kickabout. No, his gaze would have been squarely aimed at the penalty area, the scrambling maw of flesh and sweat-decreasing future-cloth, scanning specifically for incidents like this Huth-undressing. No penalty was awarded, of course, because none, for some reason, ever are. Why, you ask? Why does the wren sing out cheerily in those precious, frosty moments just before a winter’s dawn?
I’d like now to speak about diving, and when to punish it. To say it was a plague in our sport would be overstating it; it’s more a suspicious mole on the backside of our sport, something we see and worry fretfully about only when we notice it in the mirror – something we’d really like to have removed but aren’t really motivated enough to get a quote from a plastic surgeon about.
With that in mind; why, I’ll ask the jury. Do referees seem very keen to whip out fresh slices of cheddar for players who dive, and who aren’t already booked, but seem content with simply not awarding a foul and playing on when a booked player hurls himself theatrically to the floor? When was the last time a player was awarded a second and final yellow card for simulation?
It gives us all a warm rush of satisfaction seeing a known diver punished publicly, that much is smilingly agreed upon (unless, of course, the diver plays for the team we support, in which case it’s safe to assume Watergate-calibre conspiracies are being plotted against us). But these moments of “it’s not a foul, but it’s not a dive” seem a little too vague to base game-changing non-rulings on.
Surely if, in the mind of the official, there has been no illegal contact made, and yet the downed player rolls on the floor, writhing in erroneous agony and glancing pleadingly at the referee, then someone is going unpunished.
There is, of course, serious survivor-bias at work here; perfectly refereed matches don’t live long in the memory, as the man in the middle completes his duties without incident. It’s the howling mares, the afternoons garnished with handfuls of clanging miscalls that stick in the mind like a hot needle.
We remember the failures, and dismiss the successes as evidence of the bare minimum being achieved. For one of the people out there, on the turf when Saturday comes, there is no winning, no matter what the score is as the final whistle shrieks out.
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