It turns out the men in black are just like us after all
The results, lest anyone has forgotten, made for superb TV.
Both clubs had been informed of the unusual device under the referee’s uniform, but word never reached the away dressing room. The result was a free pass for an unusually polite Millwall while Arsenal were all but hung out to dry. Elleray himself complained later about the selective editing, claiming it skewed the overall picture, but Arsenal did themselves no favours.
Tony Adams was chief among them, the skipper bordering on apoplectic when Elleray disallowed his scruffy toe-poke ‘goal’ and, after a stream of protests delivered at increasingly probable pitches, rounding it all off by calling the official an effin’ cheat. The media storm that followed was such that the football authorities in the UK haven’t even considered anything similar since.
That is a shame because referees remain enigmas in our main field sports. Central to the show and yet apart from it, they are the voiceless few on which so many demands are placed. Even rugby referees, whose discourse with players is clearly heard, remain muted once the final whistle is sounded and the inevitable recriminations begin to emanate from frustrated players, managers and supporters.
That much was clear again this week watching the four-part documentary series Men In Black which followed Alan Kelly (soccer), David Coldrick (Gaelic football), Barry Kelly (hurling) and Alain Rolland (rugby) as they oversaw events in their respective codes.
“He’s moaning cos he didn’t get a flag and he’s moaning cos he did get a flag,” said Kelly at one point in a friendly between Liverpool and Celtic at the Aviva Stadium.
Damned if you do… “We all hear about what managers say about referees after games,” says Cillian Ó Conchúir who directed the documentary, “especially if there has been a controversial incident or decision, but you never hear the referee’s opinion, why they made a decision, so [the documentary] was to highlight their point of view, really.”
The last of the quartet, on Rolland, screens tonight at 9pm on Setanta and is worth a look.
The result has been a rare peak inside a world of which the general public knows little, but could do with appreciating given the invective that can stream the way of referees. Bad language? There is plenty, but the most striking aspect of the two hours or so of footage is the mostly civilised manner in which players and referees went about their business.
Christian names were commonplace, players and referees seeking to build bridges by utilising the first person singular rather than surnames or numbers. For the most part anyway.
The Ulster final between Monaghan and Donegal last summer, in particular, was a surprise. Painted as a bear pit by the media and pundits, the players were politeness personified around Coldrick and, unlike Arsenal, they hadn’t been made aware of any mic.
And yet, there is simply no disguising the extent of the task for all of them. Stripped away of commentary and with cameras zooming in on the them rather than the action, the effect was to highlight the confusion, the randomness of events and the pace at which these men and women have to go, both physically and mentally, in order to do what they do. The surprise isn’t that they get so much wrong but that they get so much right. More than anything, the documentaries served to humanise.
Humour abounded, on and off the pitch. Kelly’s curt dismissals of complaints among them. “Not much of a foul is like not much being pregnant,” he says at one point while his reaction to being called ‘only a Croke Park ref’ at one club game was pricelessly dead pan. “I think he meant it as an insult.” If nothing else, it answered for once and for all the question as to why anyone would want to be a referee.
The answer is simple: enjoyment and ambition.
Kelly subsequently moved to the MLS in the US to referee full-time. His ultimate goal is a World Cup. Coldrick and Kelly both spoke about the desire to be throwing the ball up or in come September while Rolland, having refereed his last Six Nations game, this year’s meeting of Wales and France at the Millennium Stadium, summed it up succinctly.
“This is why we do what we do,” he explains after the day is done and over 70,000 people have drained from Cardiff’s great arena. “People feel it’s a thankless job, but it is the complete opposite. It’s the best feeling in the world.”
