Who’s the human in the black?
In a week that David Moyes finally began to look like a Manchester United manager; masterminding opening goals via the unsteadiness of Ashley Young and Antonio Valencia’s invisibility cloak; ex-Premier League ref Mark Halsey demonstrated the precision timing you might expect to tell of his fulfilling textual relationship with Alex Ferguson.
In the serialisation of his upcoming book Added Time; Halsey also writes of his friendship with Jose Mourinho, who paid for a family holiday in the Algarve when the referee’s wife was recovering from cancer.
The texts, if they happened, broke rules and it’s impossible to read about Halsey’s efforts to have Ferguson intervene in the Mark Clattenburg dispute without remembering that Ferguson never forgot a favour dispensed.
Witness last season’s outburst about Newcastle’s Alan Pardew: “He forgets the help I gave him.”
But Halsey’s tales of touchline bonhomie might read like welcome civil interaction from grown-ups working in the same business if there wasn’t enough evidence elsewhere in his book of an approach to officiating that disregarded the old sporting adage; ‘play the game, not the occasion’.
There is nothing, yet, in Added Time, to match the delusions of another ex-ref Jeff Winter, who wrote memorably in his book of the roar that greeted the final whistle in his last match at Anfield.
“Did they know it was my final visit? Was it applause for me? They are such knowledgeable football people, it would not surprise me.”
And while Ferguson this week described Halsey as “a little bit Walter Mitty”, the star-struck insecurity present here can’t compete with Graham Poll’s, who asked Zidane for his shirt during a match and also managed to collect the shirt of Josip Simunic, to whom he showed three yellow cards at the 2006 World Cup.
“A shirt of the night we made history.”
But it’s obvious, too, that Halsey also considered himself part of the show.
In a recent Daily Telegraph interview, we learned how he “loved being out there every weekend, playing a part in the world’s most-watched football competition, his decision-making as likely to be discussed in Bangkok as Burnley.”
Now the Thais will worry that he curried favour.
Writing of last season’s fraught clash between Liverpool and United, Halsey talks about how he loved visiting Anfield for the big games, how there were a couple of bad early fouls in the match, but he decided against bookings.
“After the latter one, Steven Gerrard came up to me and insisted that it should have been a yellow card. ‘So should Shelvey’s’, I said. ‘Fair enough’, said Steven. ‘That’s one-all then’.”
A fine consolation to the next Hull or Cardiff nobody who accumulates enough yellows for a suspension.
Halsey’s pride in the wrong decisions as much as the right ones is a recurring theme.
In fact, there are no wrong decisions; only ‘game management.’ Halsey admits to finding out about his mistakes from Sky at half-time in games, seemingly another rule-breach.
And he evened the score after failing to punish Callum McManaman for his lunge at Massimo Haidara.
“James Perch committed an offence which merited a second yellow, but there was no way emotionally I could justify sending him off after I’d missed McManaman.”
In that Anfield game, Halsey accepts his decision to send off Shelvey for a tackle on Jonny Evans was informed by the Liverpool man’s ability to get up after the collision.
“If he had stayed down, I might just have shown both players a yellow.”
In short, Halsey stakes a convincing claim to be a bona fide human being; bolstering this case with an admission that he once cut a first half short at Old Trafford because he had to go to the toilet. Fergie laughed, suggests Halsey, and United went on to win 1-0. The ‘thankfully’ can be implied.
But having admitted to all the human frailties that will prevent us ever achieving the mythical ‘consistency’ in refereeing; Halsey baulks at the obvious one — that his decisions might have been influenced by a subconscious eagerness to ingratiate himself to his powerful friends.
He is cheered up after the Shelvey incident, first by a text from another ref – “class red card” — a level of critical rigour comparable to what Halsey has brought to his commentary work on BT Sport this season.
But then his spirits are lifted further when Ferguson called his performance “one of the best and bravest by a ref in all his years of going to Anfield”.
Ferguson has always maintained a keen interest in the moral fibre of referees he found on his travels. He wrote the foreword for Poll’s book, where he describes him as “the kind of strong referee you needed when you went to places like Arsenal or Chelsea or Liverpool.”
Flexing his muscles sufficiently to qualify as one of Ferguson’s strong men seems to have been important to Halsey, although he doesn’t have to call on him to introduce the book, since Mourinho obliges.
Does any of it matter? The Premier League clearly think so.
Having first tried to stop the book, there are now rumblings about a cull on ‘personality’ refs.
Brand management is to be prioritised over game management.
The alternative, I suppose, is some kind of friendship equivalent of financial fair play, where refs are forced on man dates with lads like Malky Mackay and Paul Lambert.
Having just said goodbye to Fergie time, we don’t want to find ourselves wondering; who are Moysie’s mates?
In my other role as an obliging husband, I saw About Time last week; a Richard Curtis movie in which one of Brendan Gleeson’s young lads pretends to be Hugh Grant and gains the gift of time travel; an asset he employs assiduously in his attempts to find love.
Obviously, in a Curtis production, he secures the affections of an American lady. And if I may offer a small spoiler, everything goes fine until young Gleeson discovers you can’t rewind the calendar beyond the birth of your first born, or they may not be born at all.
A tricky one.
And what could you do, when your mind wandered during the obligatory Curtis bit where a lady tries on many dresses, but load Mayo fans into the same boat?
Would they go back to ’96 and stop the hop? Or even to ’89 and get Finnerty to go low? Or to last year and remind the boys to tune in early and they’d be grand?
But if they had mended any of the old heartbreaks, would this team have been born; a team that has given them a year worthy of banishing a curse?
Maybe it’s made of the heartbreaks, this team. But maybe it must forget them too. If you live in and relish the moment, you’ll have no need to go back.
That’s what Mayo must do now. It’s about time.
Should be remembered for the memories he made rather than the jaw he broke. Boxing’s golden age loses another jewel from its crown.
Maybe his finest hour. “Beautiful young eggs, eggs that need a mum, in this case a dad, to take care of them, to keep them warm during the winter…” The nicest thing anyone has ever said about JT and his nestlings.
From what I can hear, once the dogs in the street have transcribed it; he’s trying too hard in this new gig. Perhaps he will settle down.
Shouldn’t be too hard on the lad; but might the time for big talk be after he has actually done something at international level?
