BLUE WATCH: Lack of respect is latest blight for football

Mar 26 2008 by Our Correspondent, Liverpool Daily Post

IT WOULD appear that showing a lack of respect for referees is the new studs-up challenge.

Since Ashley Cole turned his back on Mike Riley and Javier Mascherano obligingly gave Steve Bennett the chance to prove a point, the usual outlets have been buzzing with the same mock outrage that followed Martin Taylor’s tackle on Eduardo. Apparently the game is ‘spiralling out of control’ and the paying customers are ‘worried where it will all end’.

Stop us if you’ve heard all this before, but we have to remember that Premier League stars are role models to the nation’s kids and have a responsibility to the game at grass roots level, whatever that actually is.

What neither the pious pundits nor ‘outraged of Altrincham’ ever mention when they are spouting on about the latest stain on the beautiful game is the fact that the vast majority of people absolutely adore all this controversy. After all, professional football is just WWF wrestling but with slightly more play-acting.

Be it Fergie’s mind games, 20-man brawls, roasting, bungs or horror tackles, the public lap it all up. If they didn’t, why else would anyone pay to look at stills taken of Paul Jewell lying on his side and perspiring rather fetchingly in his decorating T-shirt?

When it comes to the national game, the 90 minutes on a Saturday or Sunday are largely irrelevant, well, the boring kicking a leather ball about bits are anyway. All the drama comes from and personalities and controversy – they are the meat and drink that fill the column inches and airwaves for the week until the next instalment of the greatest league in the world and the ensuing batch of red-hot flashpoints that will render Javier and Ashley’s petulance distant memories.

Andy Gray, for instance, can rant all he wants, but ultimately if Keith Hackett and his charges did everything that ex-Everton man wanted then he would be left with nothing to talk to Richard Keys about other than formations and off-side traps. Riveting stuff. And while moaners like Gray and Alan Green are bad enough for making a living out of fake outrage, what about the ubiquitous Graham Poll?

You can’t turn a radio or television on without encountering him harping on about the modern game’s ills. Bear in mind that this is a man who has carved himself a media career out of being a controversial – ie bad – official.

Would there be a market for his book, Seeing Red, for instance, if he had simply been a no nonsense referee who quietly and confidently got on with the game? It seems unlikely.

Which makes you wonder, when the current crop are officiating and there is a potential flashpoint, particularly in a big game, is their first thought about how their decision needs to apply the letter and the spirit of the law, or whether it is likely to be memorable enough to help them secure a publishing deal with Random House?

On the subject of publishers, David Moyes must be extremely satisfied with the outcome of his litigation against Wayne Rooney and HarperCollins. The edited, paperback version of Wayne Rooney: My Story So Far is petty enough in its every mention of Moyes, so the original that sparked the legal action must have been extremely spiteful indeed.

What would you expect though, from an individual who, when asked to name the three best goals he has ever scored, couldn’t find space for the one that launched him to fame – or any other goal in an Everton shirt for that matter?